Re: [PATCH] t9010: svnadmin can fail even if available

Ramkumar Ramachandra [off-list ref] writes:

Jonathan Nieder writes:

quoted

To do the same for t91* would be impossible.  If svn is broken or not
installed, svn-fe will run fine, but "git svn" will not.  On the other
hand, if svnadmin were broken but svn still worked, "git svn" would be
fine but that would be quite strange and I do not think it is worth
spending time to prepare for.

I don't think it's worth spending time preparing for every concievable
breakage. The patch A few more examples of possible breakages I've
encountered:
- APR compiled without threading support, SVN compiled with it, or
  viceversa.
- SVN is compiled against GNU iconv, but apr-iconv installed, or
  viceversa.
- Two different versions of a dependent library are installed, and SVN
  links to a different version in a different location.

One or many components of SVN may fail. So, I'm in favor of the
current approach: if SVN is installed, attempt to run all the t91*
tests. Any failure can either be interpreted as a real test failure or
malformed SVN installation.

That was what I was alluding to earlier, but ...

 (1) the patch has already been written and it looks obviously correct;

 (2) the code after the patch is shorter and more readable; and

 (3) this will prevent the mailing list from getting spammed by useless
     "bug reports" that should have been directed to distros that packaged
     subversion in one broken way.

Admittedly, it may only catch a breakage in one particular way and not
other ways, so we cannot put too much weight on (3), but I would say (2)
above alone is a merit enough for us to have this.