[gnulib-tool-py] comments

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Dmitriy,

While looking at the process spawning code, I see this code in method
GNULibInfo.date:

      args = ['git', 'log', FILES['changelog']]
      proc1 = sp.Popen(args,stdout=sp.PIPE)
      proc2 = sp.Popen(['head'],
        stdin=proc1.stdout, stdout=sp.PIPE)
      proc1.stdout.close()
      while counter <= 2:
        result += proc2.stdout.readline()
        counter += 1
      pattern = re.compile('Date:[\t ]*(.*?)\n')
      result = pattern.findall(result)[0]
      pattern = re.compile('^[^ ]* ([^ ]*) ([0-9]*) ([0-9:]*) ([0-9]*) ')
      result = pattern.sub('\\1 \\2 \\4 \\3 ', result)
      args = ['date', '-d', result, '-u', '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S']
      proc = sp.check_output(args)
      result = str(proc)

The original code had a couple of comments:

    sed_extract_first_date='/^Date/{
s/^Date:[        ]*//p
q
}'
    date=`cd "$gnulib_dir" && git log ChangeLog | sed -n -e 
"$sed_extract_first_date"`
    # Turn "Fri Mar 21 07:16:51 2008 -0600" into "Mar 21 2008 07:16:51 -0600".
    sed_year_before_time='s/^[^ ]* \([^ ]*\) \([0-9]*\) \([0-9:]*\) \([0-9]*\) 
/\1 \2 \4 \3 /'
    date=`echo "$date" | sed -e "$sed_year_before_time"`
    # Use GNU date to compute the time in GMT.
    date=`date -d "$date" -u +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"`
    version=' '`cd "$gnulib_dir" && ./build-aux/git-version-gen /dev/null | sed 
-e 's/-dirty/-modified/'`

I think without these two comment lines, it is impossible to understand
what the code is trying to do. Could you please keep these comments in
the rewrite?

Bruno