Re: Test failures with GNU grep 2.23

From: John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk>
Date: Feb 19, 2016, 19:23 UTC
Message-ID: <20160219192311.GB1766@serenity.lan>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqmvqwd2ie.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 09:38:17AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > Yeah, I'd worry that "-a" is not portable. OTOH, BSD grep seems to have
> > it, so between that and GNU, I think most systems are covered. We could
> > do:
> >
> >   test_lazy_prereq GREP_A '
> > 	echo foo | grep -a foo
> >   '
> >
> > and mark these tests with it. I'd also be happy to skip that step and
> > just do it if and when somebody actually complains about a system
> > without it (I wouldn't be surprised if most people on antique systems
> > end up installing GNU grep anyway).
> >
> > Another option might be using "sed -ne '/^author/p'" or similar. But
> > that may very well just be trading one portability problem for another.
> 
> Would $PERL help, I wonder?

I suspect that any grep that lacks "-a" also lacks binary file handling that will break these tests. I found a Solaris grep that doesn't support "-a" and it treats these files as text.

>From that perspective, it would be better to have a central place that

deals with figuring out how to get grep to work for us. Perhaps we need test_grep to get this right. We already have test_cmp_bin() as a thin wrapper around cmp so I don't think this is completely unprecedented.