Re: [PATCH/RFC] Change t0204-gettext-reencode-sanity.sh to pass under Mac OSX

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 7, 2012, 21:34 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfwdkm6xs.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <CACBZZX4P=JSdP_vLOMx5r3R+YO8SMSs5W8+vf2DMibKMwBx_Vg@mail.gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> I think in particular re-encoding works completely differently under
> the Perl i18n library than it does with GNU gettext (and we don't have
> tests for this) and instead of just dropping unknown characters under
> non-UTF-8 locales on some platforms everything may turn into complete
> gibberish.
>
> When I added this test this was what I was planning to smoke
> out. Different behaviors on different platforms. In this case the OSX
> behavior seems benign,...

I am not sure where you are drawing the line between "complete gibberish" and "incorrect transliteration", but if you mean by "gibberish" something that makes user's terminal go berserk, spitting out UTF-8 when the reader has asked for and is expecting Latin-1 is already throwing "gibberish", so Mac OS X should fail the test, I would think.

But for this particular test case, it is even worse, as the test is asking to do an impossible task to the transliteration machinery, so it is not even "gibberish" test. If the input caused the program to terminate without an error but without producing an output, that won't be "gibberish" case, but should that be treated as "success"?

> I think it's important to be pro-active about trying to spot
> any issues that might affect end users before they happen.

The goal is noble, but asking the platform to perform an impossible task and subjectively judging if the failure mode is acceptable is not the way to do so, I would have to say.