On Sat, Oct 11, 2014 at 09:02:20AM +0200, David Bremner wrote:
> W. Trevor King writes:
> > On Sat, Oct 11, 2014 at 06:53:11AM +0200, David Bremner wrote:
> >> W. Trevor King writes:
> >> > but I expect that closing stdin is more portable than the
> >> > /dev/null path.
> >> 
> >> /dev/null is part of POSIX
> >
> > Maybe folks want to use nmbug on Windows or some other crazy
> > non-POSIX OS?  I don't know how Windows-compatible the rest of
> > notmuch is (it looks like Xapian can be built with MSYS+mingw or
> > MSVC [1,2]), and I don't think supporting non-POSIX OSes is worth
> > a lot of effort, but using stdin instead here is easy ;).
> 
> I have no objection to the code, but I think the comment about
> portability just causes confusion. As witnessed by this discussion.

I wanted to explain why I wasn't using /dev/null, especially since
that's what the Perl version used and that phrasing is preserved in
the current comment:

  # magic hash for Git (git hash-object -t blob /dev/null)                        
  _EMPTYBLOB = 'e69de29bb2d1d6434b8b29ae775ad8c2e48c5391'

So how should I more clearly explain why I prefer stdin to /dev/null?
Maybe “… is more portable than the /dev/null path (which doesn't exist
on Windows, for example).”?

Cheers,
Trevor

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