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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

It's just a design error in the original implementation where linguist assumes that the "primary_extension" for any particular language will be unique among all primary_extensions. Obviously that was a mistake, but that's where we are. The comment that set people off was perhaps poorly worded, but it was an honest suggestion to work around the design bug.

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A better suggestion: fix the defect. Just delete primary_extension. At best, it does nothing that the extensions array can't do, as it doesn't appear at first glance that any check to primary_extension does not also include a check to extensions.

At worst, it is confusing to implementers and requires chicanery to work around... which is exactly the case we're in. We're in the worst case scenario for this bit of code, and there is no upside to its best-case scenario. Just delete the code.

I bet it's not as easy as "just delete the code". They will probably have to do quite a bit of refactoring to remove this, followed by a probably even larger amount of testing.

Long-term this is probably the right solution, but why go through all this trouble right now if there is a simple workaround? It seems like the only problem right now is a few people's pride.

Of course it's not that easy. They don't have a compiler with a static checker to show them all the places the field was used :P

How much you wanna bet? (https://github.com/github/linguist/issues/985)

If I'm reading this right all this does is define the first extension as the primary extension, which still has to be unique. So they would still have to use a different extension as the first one in the list, it just wouldn't be called "primary" anymore. How would this help?

There is no unicity check anymore; I just kept the first one special because some private code at GitHub seems to rely on the primary_extension property for the Gist editor. As I can't hack this (it is private), I can't remove it entirely.

There's no more requirement for it to be unique as far as I can see.

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