Re: [PATCH 1/2] t5534: new test case for atomic signed push

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Sep 16, 2020, 00:34 UTC
Message-ID: <20200916003448.GH2866143@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqv9gezsr9.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

On 2020-09-15 at 20:31:38, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> Han Xin <chiyutianyi@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > In order to test signed atomic push, add a new test case.
> >
> > Reviewed-by: Jiang Xin <zhiyou.jx@alibaba-inc.com>
> > Signed-off-by: Han Xin <hanxin.hx@alibaba-inc.com>
> > ---
> 
> Thanks, but nowhere in the above it does not say what is being
> tested.  By looking at 2/2 (by the way, these should be a single
> atomic patch, not a "failure turns into success", as it is not even
> a bug fix), readers may be able to guess that you want to enforce
> that with even broken implementation of GPG, an immediate failure to
> push one of the refs will be noticed by looking at their refs, but
> it is unclear why that is even desirable---if you combine the two
> patches, you may have a better place to argue why it is a good idea,
> but a test-only patch makes it even less clear why the new behavior
> expected by this test is desirable.

Yeah, I find myself a little confused by this, and I think maybe a more verbose commit message could be valuable in clearing that up. I think what this series is trying to do is check that if we can tell on the client side that the push will be rejected, then not to invoke GnuPG to generate the push certificate.

If so, that would be a nice change; after all, the user's key may involve a smartcard or a passphrase and avoiding needless hassle for the user would be desirable. But even after reading the series, it's not clear to me that that _is_ what the goal is here or that this is necessarily the best way of going about it. Telling us more about the reason for the patch would help us understand the change and why it's valuable better.

-- 
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US