On Mon, May 31 2021, Han-Wen Nienhuys via GitGitGadget wrote:

Rewrites some tests to avoid direct filesystem access.

Introduces the test prereq REFFILES to mark other tests that depend on
specifics of the files ref backend.

changes in v3 (relative to v2 from Apr 27)

 * address avarab's feedback.

I've looked this v3 over, and I think this is ready to go, and would
like to see this get merged down to next etc. Any minor quibbles I might
have are far outweighed by a desire to get this whole topic back on
track.

A bit more detail:

Per my feedback on v2 I'm not sure we're getting the right trade-off of
over skipping tests v.s. asserting new behavior, but as noted there
we've got the chicken & egg problem that we don't have reftable yet, so
we can't assert the new behavior, just discuss it in the abstract.

So our goal with this shouldn't be to get this perfect, but just get the
tests closer to not being file-backend specific.

Once we have this topic in "master" and a re-rolled reftable on top we
can always (and I plan to do this) see where exactly we end up differing
under reftable v.s. file backend.

Maybe that'll result in a different approach for a few tests being
changed here.