[Quilt-dev] Protection against double inclusion of scripts/patchfns

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Andreas,

All quilt commands start by sourcing scripts/patchfns, but before doing
so, they check whether this file has already been sourced. Looking at
the code, I can't see any case where the file would have been sourced
already (it is being sourced exactly once in each command-specific
file). Can you remember why you added that check?

The only thing that came to my mind was that maybe you wanted to make
it possible to pre-source the file so that individual commands do not
need to do it again. That would make sense from a performance
perspective, however I don't think this can be done at the moment,
because a number of checks in scripts/patchfns are context-dependent
(sourcing of $QUILTRC, addition of default arguments for the command,
discovery of the source tree's root, setting of $QUILT_PATCHES,
$QUILT_SERIES and $SERIES, version check and now series check). So it
would only work if we would split non context-dependent code to a
separate file and pre-source only that file.

Whether we ever want to do that or not, I'm not sure, as it would
seriously clutter the shell's environment, especially considering the
lack of namespace marker for all functions in this file.

So I am considering removing the check for double inclusion. Do you
have any objection to me doing that?

If the check is really needed then I'd rather move it to
scripts/patchfns itself so that it isn't duplicated in every
command-specific file, pretty much as is traditionally done for C
header files.

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support