Bug#1068890: diffoscope: --hard-timeout option

[Chris Lamb]

Holger Levsen wrote:

>> (1) You suggest it should start again with "--max-container-depth 3",
>> but it would surely need some syntax (or another option?) to control
>> that "3" (but for the second time only).
>
> another option, --second-pass-max-container-depth or some such
>
>> (2) In fact, its easy to imagine that one would want to restart with
>> other restrictions as well: not just --max-container-depth. For
>> instance, excluding external commands like readelf and objdump that
>> you know to be slow.
>
> yes, that's a good idea and IMO should be automatically implied for the
> 2nd pass or round or try.

It's definitely a "good idea" in the sense that I can  definitely  see
someone   wanting   to   achieve   that   as   an   end   result    :)

Yet… upon thinking about it a bit, I don't think it is a good idea  at
all for diffoscope to  grow  a  bunch  of  new  options  or  hardcoded
defaults for a second run.  What (1) and (2) show here is that as soon
as a user would like to adjust these second pass options in  any  way,
then the whole interface becomes very  unwieldy.  Not  only  that, but
from the user's point of view it's neither flexible nor transparent as
well, especially when compared to "just" running diffoscope twice with
different options.  There's no "magic" there, if you see what I  mean.

Can we implement running diffoscope twice  on  tests.r-b.org  manually
first and see how that  goes?   I'm  not  100%  against  the  idea  of
implementing this in diffoscope eventually, but it would make a lot of
sense to try out the "manual" version first and gain  some  real-world
experience first.


Regards,

-- 
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