Re: [PATCH] Add test-tr: poor-man tr

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 12, 2008, 06:23 UTC
Message-ID: <20080612062309.GA31816@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20080612060152.GA3798@steel.home>

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 08:01:52AM +0200, Alex Riesen wrote:

> Frankly, it started because I wanted to minimize use of Perl on
> Windows (because I can't get around ActiveState Perl at work, and it
> breaks almost everything it touches). Accidentally, it is also faster
> there (maybe just because it's smaller).

Ah, right. Well, I am not opposed to getting rid of perl in the test scripts (there is core functionality provided by perl, so one can easily run git on a system with no perl at all).

However, even with your patch, there is still some perl left, so I am not sure that it has really bought us very much.

> But, as was already noted, tr does not behave the same for all
> platforms (there were even differences in output, BSD or Solaris put
> out a stray LF?).

I think those were all resolved by using perl, and your patch replaces them with test-tr.

> > Or is your rationale "this will prevent people from screwing up the test
> > scripts accidentally in the future"?
> We just can't have that. Nothing can prevent people from screwing up
> anything in any given point of time :)

Heh. At least we can yell at them after the fact for not using the available tool. :)

> In any case, I wont push this change too hard. I must admit, that
> there is no real good reason besides one "screwed" company using
> obsoleted tools in a weird way. And it is a maintenance effort (and
> people will forget to use test-tr instead of perl and tr).

There is maintenance effort either way; people need to know not to do unportable things with tr (and other tools), and the solution to that is to run the test scripts on each platform (something we are starting to do).

So I am not opposed to test-tr, I just wanted you to explain it better in the commit log. ;)

-Peff