Re: [PATCH v2] CodingGuidelines: explicitly allow "local" for test scripts

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: May 4, 2021, 20:22 UTC
Message-ID: <6091ad06cecb0_b34a8208bf@natae.notmuch>
In-Reply-To: <87a6pawmyu.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Tue, May 04 2021, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >> It's effectively synonymous with saying "we still want to support git on
> >> platforms that are so broken they can't even run a single test in our
> >> test suite".
> >
> > Not really.  Those on such a platform would (rightly) say that it is
> > the test suite that is broken and out of compliance.
> 
> Indeed. But the lack of any reports about that suggests that in practice
> this is universally supported enough to be a hard dependency.

It is universally supported but not always in the same way, which is why it hasn't managed to become part of POSIX.

I for example stumbled upon an issue where 'local x' does not work the same in bash and zsh, triggering a huge discussion on the zsh mailing list.

However, if you set a value (e.g. 'local x=') then you shouldn't have any problems.

  f () { local x; echo ${x-unset}; }; f # this behavior varies

For a full discussion check [1].

[1] https://www.austingroupbugs.net/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=767

-- 
Felipe Contreras