patch, 2 partsmeson-windows-test ci output fixes

I ran into a failed test a month or two ago that triggered only on the windows-meson-test jobs. But those jobs don't actually show you any output from the test scripts!

This is what I hacked up to improve things.

  [1/2]: unit-test: ignore --no-chain-lint
  [2/2]: ci(windows-meson-test): handle options and output like other test jobs

 .github/workflows/main.yml | 12 +++++++++++-
 ci/run-test-slice-meson.sh | 13 +++++++++++++
 t/unit-tests/unit-test.c   |  1 +
 3 files changed, 25 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
 create mode 100755 ci/run-test-slice-meson.sh

-Peff

In the same spirit as 9faf3963b6 (t: introduce compatibility options to clar-based tests, 2024-12-13), we should ignore --no-chain-lint passed to our clar tests, since it may appear in GIT_TEST_OPTS to be used with other tests.

This is particularly important on Windows CI, where --no-chain-lint is added to the test options by default, and the meson build will pass all options to the unit tests. The only reason our meson Windows CI job does not run into this currently is that it is not respecting GIT_TEST_OPTS at all! So ignoring this option is a prerequisite to fixing that situation.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
---
 t/unit-tests/unit-test.c | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

The GitHub windows-meson-test jobs directly run "meson test" with the --slice option. This means they skip all of the ci/lib.sh infrastructure, and in particular:

  1. They do not actually set any GIT_TEST_OPTS like --verbose-log or
     -x.

  2. They do not do the usual handle_failed_tests() magic to print test
     failures or tar up failed directories.

As a result, you get almost no feedback at all when a test fails in this job, making debugging rather tricky.

Let's try to make this behave more like the other CI jobs. Because we're on Windows, we can't just use the normal run-build-and-tests.sh script. Our build runs as a separate job (like the non-meson Windows job), and then we parallelize the tests across several job slices. So we need something like the run-test-slice.sh script that the "windows-test" job uses.

In theory we could just swap out the "make" invocation there for "meson". But it doesn't quite work, because "make" knows how to pull GIT_TEST_OPTS out of GIT-BUILD-OPTIONS automatically. But for meson, we have to extract them into the --test-args option ourselves. I tried making the logic in run-test-slice.sh conditional, but there ended up being hardly any common code at all (and there are some tricky ordering constraints). So I added up with a new meson-specific test-slice runner.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
---
BTW, one curiosity. I tried swapping out "pwsh" as the shell for "bash",
to match what the non-meson test does. And it _mostly_ works, but
curiously it causes a handful of mergetool tests to fail (it looks like
maybe "c:\foo" Windows-style paths get used where we expect "/c/foo"
paths). I didn't dig further, and just added it to my "things that
confuse and terrify me about Windows" list.

 .github/workflows/main.yml | 12 +++++++++++-
 ci/run-test-slice-meson.sh | 13 +++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 24 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
 create mode 100755 ci/run-test-slice-meson.sh

Hi Jeff,

On Tue, 18 Nov 2025, Jeff King wrote:

Thank you for fixing this. The patch looks good to me.

I cannot help but wonder whether switching to Meson was worth it, as we're not only deviating from the mainstream (if MSYS2 is any indication, Meson usage is negligible: 16 packages use it in MSYS2, 294 use CMake, and 975 use GNU make), but also are forced to repeat the very same steps we already took for `make`-based builds and then for CMake builds. This very much makes me think of some saying I vaguely remember that involves history and something about repetitions.

Indeed, the path conversion kicks in, where `/mingw64` gets converted to `D:\git-for-windows-minimal\mingw64` or something like that so that PowerShell isn't losing its mind over paths that simply don't exist. When you then call Bash (implicitly, as you know all too well Git's test suite depends on it in a major way, which is still a shame), this conversion is not reverted, at least not fully.

Ciao, Johannes