Re: [PATCH] packed_ref_store: handle a packed-refs file that is a symlink

On Thu, Jun 03 2021, Jeff King wrote:

On Thu, Jun 03, 2021 at 03:23:02PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:

quoted

Jeff King wrote:

quoted

Preemptively finding portability problems may save work in the long
term. And people may even be using Git on AIX and just ignoring test
failures, or they have GNU coreutils installed anyway, etc. But it would
also save work if we can ignore platforms that nobody uses.

I agree, but the Git project is overly preoccupied (IMO) with
hypothetical issues some hypothetical users might have in some
hypothetical situations, and that is used as a rationale to block changes
that would improve the experience of the vast majority of users.

This is not a hypothetical issue, and yet you are suggesting to
discount it?

I don't disagree, but this is not consistent.

I don't think they're the same issue at all. One is: we have millions of
users, and this change may affect some of them negatively, so we may
want to err on the side of caution. The other is: this has been
accidentally broken for four years and nobody complained, so perhaps
nobody is actually using it.

Aside from AIX I think you're assuming less of a cowboy attitude among
packagers of these platforms than is the reality in the wild :)

I mean I don't blame them, git's just one thing they're packaging, and
e.g. on the BSD's or whatever this is just the Nth
Linux-toolchain-specific smelling test failure or issue they have that
day.

I have some incomplete work somewhere to slurp up all the package
sources I could find in the wild (SRPM's, Debian recipies etc.) and
their patches, the aim was to submit it into contrib/ so we could see
what monkeypatches to git.git existed in the wild.

Last time I looked at those (and this is from memory, and it was a while
ago) many of those patches / build recipies were simply blindly skipping
or otherwise working around test failures.

So we can't assume that failures in the wild are reported to us, and I
think many packagers are not running any of our tests at all. If it
compiles and seems to work they're probably just shipping it.