Re: [PATCH] tests: Introduce test_seq

On Fri, Aug 03, 2012 at 09:57:15PM +0200, Michał Kiedrowicz wrote:

Jeff King wrote:

	The seq command is GNU-ism, and is missing at least in older BSD
	releases and their derivatives, not to mention antique
	commercial Unixes.

	We already purged it in b3431bc (Don't use seq in tests, not
	everyone has it, 2007-05-02), but a few new instances have crept
	in. They went unnoticed because they are in scripts that are not
	run by default.

This commit replaces them with test_seq that is implemented with a Perl
snippet (proposed by Jeff).  This is better than inlining this snippet
everywhere it's needed because it's easier to read and it's easier to
change the implementation (e.g. to C) if we ever decide to remove Perl
from the test suite.

Note that test_seq is not a complete replacement for seq(1).  It just
has what we need now.

There are also many places that do `for i in 1 2 3 ...` but I'm not sure
if it's worth converting them to test_seq.  That would introduce running
more processes of Perl during the tests and might increase the total
time tests take.

Signed-off-by: Michał Kiedrowicz <redacted>

Fine explanation, but...

Two args to test_seq, but...

+# test_seq is a portable replacement for seq(1).
+# It may be used like:
+#
+#	for i in `test_seq 100`; do
+#		echo $i
+#	done
+
+test_seq () {
+	test $# = 1 ||
+	error "bug in the test script: not 1 parameter to test_seq"
+	last=$1
+	"$PERL_PATH" -le "print for 1..$last"
+}

it wants only one.

I think you would want:

  test $# = 1 && set -- 1 "$@"
  "$PERL_PATH" -le "print for $1..$2"

It might also be worth quoting the parameters like this:

  "$PERL_PATH" -le "print for '$1'..'$2'"

so that "test_seq a f" works, too.

-Peff