Going to copy the discussion that happened in the MR of the previous issue where this code was removed:
Sascha Grossenbacher
@berdir 6 days ago
Developer
not sure if this exclude fields feature is really needed and in scope for this? as I commented, I don't really see a case where we could possible have a recursion and I never had a use case where this would have been useful. with references, this could be quite unpredictable as it is applied to all dependencies as well.
Jim Birch
Jim Birch
@thejimbirch 6 days ago
Developer
I have no opinion on the references, but when creating recipes, I have had to edit the content entities to remove field-like things (Metatag, Scheduler).
Adam G-H
Adam G-H
@phenaproxima 3 hours ago
Author Developer
It's in scope, yeah; see @murz's comment in
https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3532951#comment-16170082
✨
[PP-1]
Postponed
and subsequent replies. Although accidental infinite loops are prevented, being able to control which dependencies are exported (by excluding fields) lies in scope.
with references, this could be quite unpredictable as it is applied to all dependencies as well.
Agreed, that's why it's not applied to dependencies.
Sascha Grossenbacher
Sascha Grossenbacher
@berdir 2 hours ago
Developer
Agreed, that's why it's not applied to dependencies.
I missed the reset at the end of the loop. FWIW, I feel like it's just as likely needed on dependencies. The very comment you linked to shows that IMHO. You might want to include the articles but not their related pages. you can't do that now.
There are ways to handle that, you could support a notation that makes this explicit, such as --exclude-fields=related_articles.related_pages. Of course that requires a more complex queue handling as you need to keep track of the relation tree for each reference.
Also, the current logic get more complicated when adding support for all/multiple entities, sooner or later you'd need to refactor this.
( I still think things adds quite a bit of complexity and isn't a strict requirement for this feature, but don't have a strong opinion on this. the comment from @thejimbirch is interesting in that it shows a more practical use case for this but at the same time, is actually not related to references)
Adam G-H
Adam G-H
@phenaproxima 1 hour ago
Author Developer
I think you've convinced me. Let's punt this to another issue so we can consider the edge cases more thoroughly. The main thing we need in this issue is defense against circular dependencies, but we already have that.