Re: [PATCH] t1308: do not get fooled by symbolic links to the source tree

From: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Date: Jun 2, 2016, 23:23 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGZ79kY1ygqd4VmwMj4AGTxo2bO6HFKoShzv6S2MxFq6QNjM1w@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160602231619.GA11277@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 4:16 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

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> On Thu, Jun 02, 2016 at 03:15:39PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> When your $PWD does not match $(/bin/pwd), e.g. you have your copy
>> of the git source tree in one place, point it with a symbolic link,
>> and then "cd" to that symbolic link before running 'make test', one
>> of the tests in t1308 expects that the per-user configuration was
>> reported to have been read from the true path (i.e. relative to the
>> target of such a symbolic link), but the test-config program reports
>> a path relative to $PWD (i.e. the symbolic link).
>>
>> Instead, expect a path relative to $HOME (aka $TRASH_DIRECTORY), as
>> per-user configuration is read from $HOME/.gitconfig and the test
>> framework sets these shell variables up in such a way to avoid this
>> problem.
>
> Looks good.
>
>   Acked-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
>
> To prevent this in the future, I switched my default --root= to point to
> a symlink. I wonder if we could do something in the test suite, though,
> as we did long ago by introducing "trash directory" with a space to
> catch corner cases.
>
> I guess it would be something like:
>
>   if test_have_prereq SYMLINKS

IIUC this would need each test to be marked with SYMLINKS when testing with symlinks is desired. Marking a test with that is easily forgotten, so I'd rather do it by default as:

if (system supports symlinks):

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>   then
>         mkdir "$TRASH_DIRECTORY.real" &&
>         ln -s "$TRASH_DIRECTORY.real" "$TRASH_DIRECTORY"
>   else
>         mkdir "$TRASH_DIRECTORY"
>   fi
>
> but there may be some other tweaks required (e.g., for cleanup).

I like the idea of testing with symlinks. (Does it have performance issues when everything goes through symlinks?)

On the other hand if we do tests by default in a symlinked path, we could introduce errors more easily in non-symlinked path, but that is what developers use for developing (I guess), so it's not as likely?

Thanks, Stefan

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>
> -Peff
> --
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