Re: [PATCH v1 2/2] travis-ci: disable GIT_TEST_HTTPD for macOS

On 10 Nov 2016, at 17:10, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 12:07:14PM +0100, Lars Schneider wrote:

quoted

quoted

Using Apache in the tests has been the source of frequent portability
problems and configuration headaches. I do wonder if we'd be better off
using some small special-purpose web server (even a short perl script
written around HTTP::Server::Simple or something).

On the other hand, testing against Apache approximates a more real-world
case, which has value. It might be nice if our tests supported multiple
web servers, but that would mean duplicating the config for each
manually.

I agree that the real-world Apache test is more valuable and I really want
to keep the Linux Apache test running. However, I don't think many people
use macOS as Git web server and therefore I thought it is not worth the
effort to investigate this problem further.

IMHO, the value in the http tests is not testing the server side, but
the client side. Without being able to set up a dummy HTTP server, we do
not have any way to exercise the client side of git-over-http at all.
And people on macOS _do_ use that. :)

Well, I haven't seen it from that perspective, yet, but I agree :-)


To all macOS users on the list:
Does anyone execute the tests with GIT_TEST_HTTPD enabled successfully?


There would be an alternative way to approach the problem:
Someone (GitHub?, BitBucket?, GitLab?, ...) could setup a bunch of webservers
with popular configurations and a way to reset a clean test environment. Then 
the TravisCI client tests could go against these servers.

I realize that this idea is probably unrealistic because too much setup and
maintenance work would be required.

Cheers,
Lars