Re: [PATCH v2] t6026-merge-attr: don't fail if sleep exits early

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

I do think the test would be a lot more obvious if it confirmed at the
end of the test that the process was still running, as opposed to
relying on test_when_finished to check it.

I agree that "check that the process is still running" is a wrong
thing to do in the first place.  What would it mean if the process
is no longer running?  It is a timing-dependent bug in the test;
after all we failed to produce the condition that could trigger a
bug that we are guarding against.  And "let's do '|| :'" is sweeping
the bug (not in the code we are testing, but in the test that will
fail to notice a bug we are preparing against) under the rug.  So I
agree with Dscho that we should do that first.

If we ensure that the process is still running, then such a check is
a good belt-and-suspenders way to catch a breakage in the mechanism
we choose to ensure it.  So probably we can require that the kill in
the "when finished" part to actually send a signal to a process that
is still running.

Is there an equivalent to pause(2) available to shell scripts?  I
really hate a single "sleep 3600" or anything with a magic number.