Re: Maintaining implementations of similar utility functions like json-fetch

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello!

Jelle Licht <jlicht@fsfe.org> skribis:

> I noticed that there are currently two very similar functions for fetching
> json data; `json-fetch' in (guix import json) and `json-fetch*' in (guix
> import github).
>
> Some things I noticed:
> - Dealing with http error codes seems to be a bit more robust in
> `json-fetch*'.
> - Making sure that (compliant) servers give responses in the proper format
> seems more robust in `json-fetch' due to using Accept headers.
> - Dealing with the fact that json responses are technically allowed to be
> lists of objects, which `json-fetch' does not handle gracefully.
>
> For this issue specifically, would it make sense to combine the two
> definitions into a more general one?

Definitely, we should just keep one.  It’s not even clear how we ended
up with the second one.

> My more general concern would be on how we can prevent bug fixes only being
> applied to one of several nearly identical functions. IOW, should we try to
> prevent situations like this from arising, or is it okay if we somehow make
> sure that fixes should be applied to both locations?

We should prevent such situations from arising, and I think we do.

The difficulty is that avoiding duplication requires knowing the whole
code base well enough.  Sometimes you just don’t know that a utility
function is available so you end up writing your own, and maybe the
reviewers don’t notice either and it goes through; or sometimes you need
a slightly different version so you duplicate the function instead of
generalizing it.

Anyway, when we find occurrences of this pattern, we should fix them!

Thanks,
Ludo’.