Re: [BUG/WIP PATCH] unit-tests: use clean test environment

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 28, 2025, 14:15 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqseny40kx.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <Z8GVAjwZWOM7c2fR@pks.im>

Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> writes:

> This to me is the biggest issue with the chosen approach. It would be
> great if we could find a way to sanitize the environment in the unit
> test executable directly instead of forcing users to run the unit tests
> via the provided script.

True. What the end-to-end tests do is to have a central place (in test-lib.sh if I recall correctly) to ensure a sane environment and have everybody run that before their own code. In theory we should be able to do the same in C (otherwise we wouldn't rewriting things done in scripts to the language ;-)).

Show 8 quoted lines

> I suspect that most environment variables shouldn't matter (for now), so
> overall the duplication may be acceptable:
>
>   - We need to unset a couple of variables, but we can probably reuse
>     logic `git rev-parse --local-env-vars`.
>
>   - We need to ask Git to not read the configuration, which we can do by
>     setting a couple of envvars. This should be manageable.

"Provide a controlled environment where Git pretends this is the $HOME and that is the $AUTHOR_NAME and so on" is much more preferrable than "Tell it not to read", no?

Thanks.