From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2011 20:46:05 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] t9010: svnadmin can fail even if available
Message-ID: <20110106204605.GA15090@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <7vpqs9aiul.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

> But I am somewhat unhappy because I do not think we want to cater to all
> the broken installations of system tools.  When tests fail because
> somebody's "mkdir -p" (just a random example I picked from your patch)
> does not work correctly, we would just say "Your system is broken, and
> here is a nickle; get a better computer".  Why is svnadmin so special?
> 
> Also isn't the breakage not just this test, but also in all the tests that
> try to run "svnadmin load"?  Shouldn't we somehow hoist this logic out of
> t9010 and put it in t/lib-vcs-svn.sh or somewhere?
>
> As far as I understand, svn interoperability bits (git-svn and vcs-svn) do
> not rely on svnadmin at runtime, so a breakage in the system's svnadmin
> would not be a reason to omit building and installing them.

You're right, I did not do a good job of selling the patch.  I should
have said:

	Subject: t9010: svnadmin can fail even if available

	If svn is built against one version of SQLite and run against
	another, libsvn_subr needlessly errors out in operations that
	need to make a commit.

	That is clearly not a bug in git but let us consider the
	ramifications for the test suite.  git-svn uses libsvn directly
	and is probably broken by that bug; it is right for git-svn
	tests to fail.  The vcs-svn lib, on the other hand, does not use
	libsvn and the test t9010 only uses svn to check its work.  This
	points to two possible improvements:

	 - do not disable most vcs-svn tests if svn is missing.
	 - skip validation rather than failing it when svn fails.

	Bring about both by putting the svn invocations into a single
	test that builds a repo to compare the test-svn-fe result
	against.  The test will always pass but only will set the new
	SVNREPO test prereq if svn succeeds; and validation using that
	repo gets an SVNREPO prerequisite so it only runs with working
	svn installations.

	Works-around: http://bugs.debian.org/608925
	Noticed-by: A Large Angry SCM <gitzilla@gmail.com>
	Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>