On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 12:56 PM Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

Like Junio, I'm a little nervous that this is going to end up being a
maintenance burden. People may hit false positives and then be
confronted with this horrible mass of sed to try to figure out what went
wrong [...]

A very valid concern.

But I came around to thinking:
  - this found and fixed real problems in the test suite, with minimal
    false positives across the existing code

The counterargument (and arguing against my own case) is that, while
it found 3 or 4 genuine test bugs hidden by &&-breakage, they were
just that: bugs in the tests; they weren't hiding any bugs in Git
itself, which is pretty measly return for the effort invested in the
linter.

However, existing tests aside, the more important goal is detecting
problems in new or updated tests hiding genuine bugs in changes to Git
itself, so it may have some value.

  - worst case is that relief is only a "git revert" away

Right. It's just a developer aid, not a user-facing feature which has
to be maintained in perpetuity, so retiring it is easy.