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

On 11 Nov 2016, at 09:47, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 09:22:51AM +0100, Lars Schneider wrote:

quoted

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.

Yeah, it seems like it adds a lot of complexity for little gain. Plus it
creates a network dependency on running the tests. I know you care
mostly about Travis, but I am much more interested in all of the people
(developers and not) who run "make test" on their own platforms.

If you did want to have a more real-world network-based test, I think
the right solution is not for GitHub to set up a bunch of mock servers,
but to design client-side tests that hit the _real_ GitHub (or GitLab,
or whatever) and perform some basic operations. OTOH, people running
"master" (or "next", etc) are doing that implicitly every day.

That is actually a neat idea. We could setup a test repo on each of the major 
Git hosting sites and then the TravisCI run could clone a repo and push
changes to it. That shouldn't take long and would probably be a good real
world test.

The credentials of these repos could be stored encrypted in Travis CI [1].

Where would such a test repo live on github.com? On github.com/git or would
you prefer a separate organization? (no worries, I am not going to tackle this
anytime soon -- too many things in my backlog already).

BTW: I just noticed https://github.com/git/hello-world ... is this legitimate
or did someone hack github.com/git? :)

Cheers,
Lars


[1] https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/environment-variables/#Defining-encrypted-variables-in-.travis.yml