Re: [PATCH v7 2/2] json-writer: t0019: add Python unit test

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 7, 2018, 02:38 UTC
Message-ID: <20180607023804.GB3898@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20180607014909.GL3094@zaya.teonanacatl.net>

On Wed, Jun 06, 2018 at 09:49:09PM -0400, Todd Zullinger wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Ramsay Jones wrote:
> [...]
> > I don't run the p4 or svn tests, so ... :-D
> 
> Heh, lucky you. :)
> 
> I try to run them all as part of the fedora builds since
> they cover much more than I'd ever use.  That's the main
> reason I noticed the bare python.  That would trip me up
> when it came time to build on a near-future fedora where
> python isn't installed by default and I only wanted to
> require python3 for the build/runtime scripts.

I'm not actually sure those svn bits involving python are usable by real users. The main tool that people us for svn interop is git-svn, which is written in perl.

There was an effort to have a real "git-remote-svn" helper (so that you could just seamlessly "git clone svn://..." instead of using the "git svn" wrapper.

So we have the work in vcs-svn, which gets built as part of a regular compile. But AFAICT it is only used for git-remote-testsvn, t/helper/test-svn-fe, and contrib/svn-fe. None of which have seen any substantive work since 2012[1].

I suppose it's possible somebody could be using "git clone testsvn://" in the wild, but the name would hopefully warn them off. I have no idea how usable that work is in practice.

-Peff

[1] Browsing "git log", most of the commits are just tree-wide
    cleanups, or fixing some compilation or dependency error. The last
    "real" commit seems to be around 8e43a1d010 (remote-svn: add
    incremental import, 2012-09-19).

    I wonder if it is worth dropping this experiment as incomplete and
    unmaintained. People have obviously spent time dealing with the code
    for various fixups, but I think the whole thing may essentially just
    be dead code. Or maybe people really are using contrib/svn-fe. Like
    I said, I have no clue if this stuff is even usable, but we
    certainly haven't packaged it to be seen by most users.