Re: [PATCH v4 0/6] Support triangular workflows

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

On Mon, Apr 01, 2013 at 02:21:22AM +0530, Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

quoted

Jeff King wrote:

quoted

[...]

So, you're saying: don't test compound statements for failure, since
anything in the chain could fail and propagate failure.  I should only
test simple git-foo commands for failure?

Right.

I think another thing to keep in mind is that "test_must_fail" is
used only to check for an expected failure from git-foo commands,
not for a random command (or sequence of commands).

The primary point of test_must_fail is not to declare _any_ failure
as "Oh, good, I wanted see it to fail and it returned non-zero exit
status so I am happy", but exclude uncontrolled failures, by saying
"Yuck, it returned non-zero exit status, but it died by signal
(e.g. SEGV), which is not the way I wanted to see it die".