Re: [PATCH] test: fix for TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY

Jeff King wrote:

On Sun, Jun 13, 2021 at 10:44:10AM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:

quoted

quoted

Unfortunately, this isn't a complete solution.

Software will never be perfect.

We don't need to wait for a perfect solution, all we need is something
better than the current siuation.

Sure, but if you don't fully understand the situation (e.g., that --root
and TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY are not equivalent), then you may end up
revisiting the incomplete fix later,

The fact that you may end up revisiting a solution is a fact for *all*
changes (including 2d14e13c56 (test output: respect
$TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY, 2013-04-29)).

or even making things worse (as this patch did).

I think breaking the test suite is objectively worse than having a few
extra files in the output directory, but to each his own.

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I think solving the whole issue would require a mechanism for passing
TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY in a way that can't be overridden (whether in an
environment variable or the command-line).

Why do we even have TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY in GIT-BUILD-OPTIONS? Looking
for a reason there's 2d14e13c56 (test output: respect
$TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY, 2013-04-29), there it says it's for
valgrind/analyze.sh.

I don't know who uses that script, or how. There's no documentaion,
nothing on the mailing list, and nothing found on Google.

Perhaps 268fac6919 (Add a script to coalesce the valgrind outputs,
2009-02-04) is enlightening.

That makes it clearer.

I don't know if anybody still uses it these days, though. I suspect it's
outlived its usefulness, in that we would typically not have any
valgrind errors at all (so coalescing them is not that interesting).

Possibly folks investigating leak-checking via valgrind could find it
useful, but even there I think LSan is a much better path forward.

Yeah, but even if they do run this tool, they can set
TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY manually.

The needs of the few should not otweight needs of the many.

quoted

So maybe:

diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index c3565fc0f8..2e25489569 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile

@@ -2790,9 +2790,6 @@ GIT-BUILD-OPTIONS: FORCE
        @echo PAGER_ENV=\''$(subst ','\'',$(subst ','\'',$(PAGER_ENV)))'\' >>$@+
        @echo DC_SHA1=\''$(subst ','\'',$(subst ','\'',$(DC_SHA1)))'\' >>$@+
        @echo X=\'$(X)\' >>$@+
-ifdef TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY
-       @echo TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY=\''$(subst ','\'',$(subst ','\'',$(TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY)))'\' >>$@+
-endif

I don't personally have any problem with that. It does mean that "make
t1234-foo.sh" will behave differently than "./t1234-foo.sh", but that is
already true if you set GIT_TEST_OPTS.

Only if you haven't changed TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY since the last time
you ran 'make' on the top level directory.

And of course if somebody really wants their environment to be honored,
that's what "make -e t1234-foo.sh" is for.

Cheers.

-- 
Felipe Contreras