Re: [PATCH 1/2] test-path-utils.c: remove incorrect assumption

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 4, 2015, 17:21 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqwpv21rej.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAOYw7dv4iPQ4cq4Ab1ZeThrp=u51T5v387a1Y8QPO-yj=fyMcg@mail.gmail.com>

Ray Donnelly <mingw.android@gmail.com> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

>> Some callers of this function in real code (i.e. not the one you are
>> removing the check) do seem to depend on that condition, e.g. the
>> codepath in clone that leads to add_to_alternates_file() wants to
>> make sure it does not add an duplicate, so it may end up not noticing
>> /foo/bar and /foo/bar/ are the same thing, no?  There may be others.
>
> Enforcing that normalize_path_copy() removes any trailing '/' (apart
> from the root directory) breaks other things that assume it doesn't
> mess with trailing '/'s, for example filtering in ls-tree. Any
> suggestions for what to do about this? Would a flag be appropriate as
> to whether to do this part or not? Though I'll admit I don't like the
> idea of adding flags to modify the behavior of something that's meant
> to "normalize" something. Alternatively, I could go through all the
> breakages and try to fix them up?

I agree with you that "normalize" should "normalize". Making sure that all the callers expect the same kind of normalization would be a lot of work but I do think that is the best approach in the long run. Thanks for the ls-tree example, by the way, did you find it by code inspection? I do not think it is reasonable to expect the test coverage for this to be 100%, so the "try to fix them up" would have to involve a lot of manual work both in fixing and reviewing, unfortunately.

The first step of the "best approach" would be to make a note on normalize_path_copy() by adding a NEEDSWORK: comment to describe the situation.

Thanks.