Re: [PATCH] grep: Don't pass a TODO test if REG_STARTEND is supported

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 16, 2010, 19:50 UTC
Message-ID: <20100716195007.GC16371@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimZ3f550HQwx3OEpO6n1b037He6hJ6rAXP8vfIk@mail.gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> Well to clarify: The TAP is arguably right, although semantically
> these sort of tests should probably be a SKIP on unsupported
> platforms, not a passing TODO.

No, we support all platforms people are willing to fix without uglifying the code too much. So a bug is a bug. Test prerequisites get used for behavior that is either out of scope (Posix-style permissions on Windows) or hard to test (signal delivery to child process in t7502-commit).

The semantic problem you are describing here is that we have no separate way to mark bugs that are not consistently reproducible. A “fixed” test_expect_failure is sometimes a fluke, like in this example.

If lucky, you can find an appropriate condition and use test_expect_success or test_expect_failure as appropriate. In the general case, that is not always easy. Better to eliminate the unreproducible bugs.

> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 18:44, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:

>> We should also just upgrade the GNU regex library in compat/regex to
>> the version that supports REG_STARTEND.

[...]

> This is what we should be focusing on

By the way, I have no preference for choice of regex library here. If something else is easier to get working correctly, that would be great.