Heads-up: new typedef 'svn_merge_rangelist_t'

Heads up: I'm going to add

  typedef apr_array_header_t svn_merge_rangelist_t;

There's no major impact; it doesn't change anything functionally.

The rest of the details:
The immediate reason is to improve the debugging experience: I can then make GDB display 'rangelist' values in a simple human-readable form, whereas presently the best it can do is recognize that it is an APR array and display something like "array of 2 items".

Beyond that, it makes sense from a coding abstraction point of view: it fills in the gap in this hierarchy of types (quoting from svn_mergeinfo.h):

/** Terminology for data structures that contain mergeinfo.
 *
 * Subversion commonly uses several data structures to represent
 * mergeinfo in RAM:
 *
 * (a) Strings (@c svn_string_t *) containing "unparsed mergeinfo".
 *
 * (b) A "rangelist".  An array (@c apr_array_header_t *) of non-overlapping
 *     merge ranges (@c svn_merge_range_t *), sorted as said by
 *     @c svn_sort_compare_ranges().  An empty range list is [...].
 *
 * (c) @c svn_mergeinfo_t, called "mergeinfo".  A hash mapping merge
 *     source paths (@c const char *, starting with slashes) to
 *     non-empty rangelist arrays.  A @c NULL hash is used to [...].
 *
 * (d) @c svn_mergeinfo_catalog_t, called a "mergeinfo catalog".  A hash
 *     mapping paths (@c const char *) to @c svn_mergeinfo_t.
 *
 * Both @c svn_mergeinfo_t and @c svn_mergeinfo_catalog_t are just
 * typedefs for @c apr_hash_t *; there is no static type-checking, and
 * you still use standard @c apr_hash_t functions to interact with
 * them. [...]
 */

  typedef apr_hash_t *svn_mergeinfo_t;
  typedef apr_hash_t *svn_mergeinfo_catalog_t;

The new type will be public.  Because it's just a typedef, the C API will be backward-compatible and it won't change the ABI.  (Can someone confirm that?)

As mentioned in that doc string, using such a typedef doesn't provide any static type-checking.

svn_merge_rangelist_t is not going to be a pointer like svn_mergeinfo_t and svn_mergeinfo_catalog_t are, since that is a poor idiom leading to inability to declare a parameter as "pointer to a const rangelist".

- Julian
Received on 2012-07-27 16:37:01 CEST