Re: [PATCH 02/25] t: use test_write_lines() instead of series of 'echo' commands

From: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Date: Jul 2, 2018, 17:53 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGZ79kamB-bid=RhDj1_vviHtD=5KCWaRJAFXh1RtwGdXgPTWA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20180702002405.3042-3-sunshine@sunshineco.com>

On Sun, Jul 1, 2018 at 5:24 PM Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

>
> These tests employ a noisy subshell (with missing &&-chain) to feed
> input into Git commands or files:
>
>     (echo a; echo b; echo c) | git some-command ...
>
> Simplify by taking advantage of test_write_lines():
>
>     test_write_lines a b c | git some-command ...

... and as piped commands only return the exit code of the last command in the piping structure this is ok, as all git commands are the last command here.

If any of the non-last commands are failing (which are the test_write_lines after this patch), we would only care if the git command fails any way, as there is no benefit in testing the correctness of test_write_lines.

This is why we chose to go this route instead of writing the output to a file and then taking the file as input for the git command. Although this alternative might be easier to debug, we choose to not use that as it would complicate this patch even more and these tests did not need debugging for a long time.

Makes sense.

Stefan