Re: [PATCH] tests: send "bug in the test script" errors to the script's stderr

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Nov 20, 2018, 10:58 UTC
Message-ID: <20181120105825.GB26263@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20181120104528.GA26263@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 05:45:28AM -0500, Jeff King wrote:

Show 15 quoted lines

> On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 12:34:04AM +0100, SZEDER Gábor wrote:
> 
> > > I do notice that many of the existing "FATAL:" errors use descriptor 5,
> > > which goes to stdout. I'm not sure if those should actually be going to
> > > stderr (or if there's some TAP significance to those lines).
> > 
> > I chose to send these messages to standard error, because they are,
> > well, errors.  TAP only cares about stdout, but by aborting the test
> > script in BUG(), error() or die() we are already violating TAP anyway,
> > so I don't think it matters whether we send "bug in test script" or
> > "FATAL" errors to stdout or stderr.
> 
> Yeah, I agree it probably doesn't matter. I was mostly suggesting to
> make the existing ">&5" into ">&7" for consistency. But I don't think
> that needs to block your patch.

By the way, I did check to see whether this might help the situation where running under "prove" we see only "Dubious..." and not the actual error() message produced by the test script. But no, it eats both stdout and stderr. You can sneak a line through by prepending it with "#", but only if "prove -o" is used (and even then, it's hard to associate it with a particular test when you're running many in parallel).

So I guess the status quo is not too bad: prove says "dubious", and then you re-run the test with "./t1234-foo.sh -v -i" and you get to see the error.

-Peff