Re: [aur-general] [ansible-aur] call for comment on pull request 50

On Sat 21Jan23 23:03, Leandro Papi via aur-general wrote:

On Sat, 23 Jan 2021 at 19:31, Roland Puntaier via aur-general wrote:

...

Generally if-then-else tend to propagate and inflate the code. The code base becomes larger and slower.

Sorry, I'm sincerely curious, in what programming language spawning a shell to run a command only to have that command blurt out a warning (and perhaps having to parse STDOUT and/or STDERR to catch that warning) is _faster_ than a simple branching condition on the length of a list?

My 2 cents are that it would be a lot easier (and faster) for both A and B if neither of them allowed empty package lists. Heck, I'd even put that if-then-else anyways in my code just to avoid spawning a shell, or calling an external hook.

The program wouldn't spawn further activity internally, if there are no packages. But as an interface it should look like 0 packages is the same as n packages. Anyway, I was more talking about the human processing. All the programmers that use pacman, yay, ... ansible.aur need to put an "if" to check whether their variable is not 0 to avoid an error. With computer programs we try to take away effort from humans.