Re: [PATCH 5/8] scalar-clone: add test coverage

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 2, 2022, 16:52 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqwnal90s6.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <9n46p076-q126-o813-8s39-936s6667o7o1@tzk.qr>

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

>> That being said, even if I update 't9211', my experience with Git's test
>> suite is that very few tests preserve test repos this way. Do you expect
>> these artifacts to be especially helpful for 'scalar clone' in particular,
>> or is this more of a "gently nudge contributors to make this standard
>> practice" sort of recommendation?
>
> Thank you for this question, which helps me clarify even to myself what my
> intention is.
>
> After considering this, yes, I would like this to be a gentle nudge to
> take a tiny step toward improving Git's test suite by recommending a new
> standard practice.

I agree that it would in general be a good idea to leave more cruft for those who want to postmortem. It will nudge a sequence of tests to use distinct test directories and output files, in order to avoid letting the later ones overwrite the earlier ones, which would be a deviation from what we have done historically.

For those who diagnose breakage manually after seeing "tXXXX.sh -i" fail, cruft left by earlier successful tests are quite distracting nuisance and that certainly was why we tried to remove them after each test piece succeeds. These days, we seem to be relying much more on unattended bulk tests at CI than before, which changes the equation.