Code review comment for lp:~spiv/bzr/inventory-delta

2009/8/7 Robert Collins <email address hidden>:
> On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 05:39 +0000, Andrew Bennetts wrote:
>
> I've trimmed things that are fine.
>
> [debug flags]
>> I hope we don't need to ask people to use them, but they are a cheap insurance
>> policy.
>>
>> More usefully, they are helpful for benchmarking and testing.  I'm ok with
>> hiding them if you like.
>
> I don't have a strong opinion. The flags are in our docs though as it
> stands, so they should be clear to people reading them rather than
> perhaps causing confusion.

I don't want the merge to get hung up on them, but I think they're
worth putting in.

It might get confusing if there are lots of flags mentioned in the
user documentation; also we may want to distinguish those ones that
change behaviour from those that are safe to leave on all the time to
gather data.

Andrew and I talked about this the other day and the reasoning was
this: we observed he's testing and comparing this by commenting out
some code. If someone's doing that (and not just for a quick
ten-minute comparison), it _may_ be worth leaving a debug option to do
it in future, so that

1- they don't accidentally leave it disabled (as has sometimes happened before)
2- other people can quickly repeat the same test with just the same change
3- if it turns out that the change does have performance or
functionality issues, users can try it with the other behaviour

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>