Requesting review of "Eliminate some pointless gymnastics in the config parser."

[Frank Nicholas]

> On Jul 8, 2016, at 12:28 AM, Eric S. Raymond <esr at thyrsus.com> wrote:
> 
> (1) Sometimes the item would directly set a field in the new node.  This
> is the case with ttl and minpoll.
> 
> (2) For flag items, such as iburst and xleave, the iterm would get put
> on a newly created list attached to the node.  Later, when some other
> function wanted the value of the flag mask for this entry, it would
> call a helper that would walk that FIFO and | the values together.
> 
> What's puzzling me is: why not just | all those flags together at the
> time of the initial parse, and stash that in a flag field?  Why create the
> linked list and delay evaluation?
> 

Would this be related to the “interleaved” mode that waited for the next round of data to complete some items?  I don’t remember the details, but it should like it was waiting for two sets of data.