Re: [GSoC][PATCH v2 3/3] t3600: use helpers to replace test -d/f/e/s <path>

Eric Sunshine [off-list ref] writes:

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 12:38 AM Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

An unrelated tangent, but what do you think of this patch?  In the
context of testing "git rm", if foo is a dangling symbolic link,
"git rm foo && test_path_is_missing foo" would need something like
this to work correctly, I would think.

 test_path_is_missing () {
-       if test -e "$1"
+       if test -e "$1" || test -L "$1"
        then
                echo "Path exists:"
                ls -ld "$1"

Makes sense. Won't we also want:

    test_path_exists () {
    -    if ! test -e "$1"
    +   if ! test -e "$1" && ! test -L "$1"
       then
            echo "Path $1 doesn't exist. $2"

or something like that?

That would make them symmetric, but what I was driving at with "In
the context of testing git rm" was that I highly suspect that among
other existing users of test_path_is_missing there are some that
want to consider a dangling symbolic link as if it is not there (and
vice versa for test_path_exists), and it may not be a good idea to
unconditionally declare that, unlike the underlying "test" command
that dereferences symlinks for most operations, our wrapper does not
dereference symbolic links, which is what the "what do you think?"
patch and your addtion do.