Re: [PATCH 0/6] test: make the test suite work with zsh

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Mar 29, 2023, 22:14 UTC
Message-ID: <ZCS4SXlkqnvjxidA@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqh6u3d119.fsf@gitster.g>

On 2023-03-29 at 15:34:26, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> "brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:
> 
> > I don't care a lot of other folks want to make zsh run the
> > testsuite in zsh mode, but I'd think that using sh mode would be
> > simpler and less likely to break in general, and would avoid us
> > needing to carry a lot of patches to work around various variables
> > that are special in zsh mode.  It would also be easier to
> > potentially test in the testsuite as well.
> 
> While these patches may make it "work" with zsh in its native mode,
> because zsh that is running in its native mode is sufficiently
> distant from the more POSIXy portable variants of Bourne shells like
> dash and bash, I find it hard to justify the cost of maintaining the
> resulting codebase to "work" that way.

I think that's a fine position to take. We have found some fun bugs in our testsuite via zsh's sh mode, and zsh (in sh mode) is a valid shell according to Debian's /bin/sh rules, so I think it's fair to address shell fixes for it in sh mode where we can, even though it sounds like we'd prefer to skip the zsh mode.

-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA