[pacman-dev] [PATCH 3/3] Remove rmrf function from frontend

[Xavier]

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I agree with Xavier here; especially knowing the function isn't
>> perfect it doesn't make sense to expose it and then have to debug
>> people's issues with it when they use it in ways we did not intend
>> (which is to remove database directory hierarchies only, etc.).
>
> It might, however, make sense to create a "common" dir where the
> object files are linked to BOTH pacman and libalpm. That's not
> actually all that hard. It would prevent code duplication and also not
> expose these things publicly.
>
>

That's definitely good to know, thanks for the information.

However I checked libalpm and pacman util.c for duplicates, and I
found exactly two : rmrf and strtrim.
So not sure if it is worth it. But in any cases, it's really not a big deal :)

And I really hate code duplication. But this case is a special one
which has never bothered me. It concerns utility functions which are
hardly ever modified, they are in well known place (util.c) and it's a
simple copy of a whole function.

The kind of code duplication that is really annoying is for instance
the one we have between upgrade.c , sync.c and remove.c . These three
have a lot of similarities but are still different so it's not obvious
how to factor the code. But it happened several times to me that
because of a change in the backend or somewhere else, I had to update
these 3 files in exactly the same way.