Re: [PATCH 4/6] config: return configset value for current_config_ functions

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 27, 2016, 02:11 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqa8jctfl5.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160527004146.GA4996@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> I think the issue is that bin-wrappers serves two purposes. One is for
> testing, but the other is for people who run git directly without
> installing.

Hmph. It may have been a useful way to "run without installing" once in the past, but with the "check and run it under GDB" etc., I am not sure if it still is. I certainly did not think about that as a valid use case when I wrote the message you are responding to.

Show 6 quoted lines

> I think you can make it even simpler by not really doing a "make
> install", but just linking or bin-wrappering a fake exec-path. It would
> be great if we could truly just "make install" into a fake area and test
> that (dropping bin-wrappers entirely), but git cares too much about some
> hard-coded paths, I think. We'd have to first have a truly relocatable
> binary.

Looking at what bin-wrappers do, I do not think "hard coded paths" is something we need them for. If we wanted to make the "test what we just built" and the "test what is already installed" closely mimic each other, I have a feeling that setting of the environment variable done by the bin-wrappers can and should be moved to the test framework. When testing what we just built, set these environment variables you see in any of the bin-wrappers/ script to point at various places in the "make DESTDIR=there install" tree, and when testing what is installed, set them to different values (possibly "nothing", e.g. GIT_EXEC_PATH would not be needed if we are testing an installed and already working version).

So I suspect "truly relocatable binary" is necessary for testing.