Re: [PATCH] t9010: svnadmin can fail even if available

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 7, 2011, 18:54 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfwt47det.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20110107165837.GA8062@kytes>

Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:

Show 21 quoted lines

> Jonathan Nieder writes:
>> To do the same for t91* would be impossible.  If svn is broken or not
>> installed, svn-fe will run fine, but "git svn" will not.  On the other
>> hand, if svnadmin were broken but svn still worked, "git svn" would be
>> fine but that would be quite strange and I do not think it is worth
>> spending time to prepare for.
>
> I don't think it's worth spending time preparing for every concievable
> breakage. The patch A few more examples of possible breakages I've
> encountered:
> - APR compiled without threading support, SVN compiled with it, or
>   viceversa.
> - SVN is compiled against GNU iconv, but apr-iconv installed, or
>   viceversa.
> - Two different versions of a dependent library are installed, and SVN
>   links to a different version in a different location.
>
> One or many components of SVN may fail. So, I'm in favor of the
> current approach: if SVN is installed, attempt to run all the t91*
> tests. Any failure can either be interpreted as a real test failure or
> malformed SVN installation.

That was what I was alluding to earlier, but ...

 (1) the patch has already been written and it looks obviously correct;

 (2) the code after the patch is shorter and more readable; and

 (3) this will prevent the mailing list from getting spammed by useless
     "bug reports" that should have been directed to distros that packaged
     subversion in one broken way.

Admittedly, it may only catch a breakage in one particular way and not other ways, so we cannot put too much weight on (3), but I would say (2) above alone is a merit enough for us to have this.