Re: [PATCH 1/4] line-log: demonstrate a bug with nearly-overlapping ranges

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 6, 2018, 15:33 UTC
Message-ID: <20180806153305.GA105466@aiede.svl.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20180806144726.GB97564@aiede.svl.corp.google.com>

Jonathan Nieder wrote:

> Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

>> It is really, really important to realize how valuable it is to have the
>> regression test as an individual patch that can be used to verify that
>> there is a bug, to pinpoint where it was introduced, to test alternative
>> fixes, to keep records separate, and I could go on and on and on. Please
>> do not ignore these very good reasons, and please refrain from
>> recommending such conflation in the future.
>
> If you want to propose changing the project's style to always separate
> tests from the patch that fixes a bug, that's a discussion we can have,
> in a separate thread.

By the way, don't get me wrong: I am sympathetic to the motivation for such a change.

I have worked on projects where tests were in a separate repository from the application. There are costs and benefits. To support the kind of use cases you're describing, the tests would include conditionals to allow running on old versions of the application (the test expectations were based on the latest version, but setup code sometimes had to accomodate differences between versions). It worked okay and was probably worth it for that project, despite the added friction. It's not clear it would be worth it for Git.

Jonathan