Re: [PATCH] t/lib-git.sh: fix ACL-related permissions failure

Adam Dinwoodie [off-list ref] writes:

This is probably a much broader conversation. I remember when I first
started packaging Git for Cygwin, I produced a release that didn't
have support for HTTPS URLs due to a missing dependency in my build
environment. The build and test suite all passed -- it assumed I just
wanted to build a release that didn't have HTTPS support -- so some
relatively critical function was silently skipped. I don't know how to
avoid that sort of issue other than relying on (a) user bug (or at
least missing function) reports and (b) folk building Git for
themselves/others periodically going through the output of the
configure scripts and the skipped subtests to make sure only expected
things get missed; neither of those options seem great to me.

I agree with you that there needs a good way to enumerate what the
unsatisfied prerequisites for a particular build are.  That would
have helped in your HTTPS situation.

But that is a separate issue how we should determine a lazy
prerequisite for any feature is satisified.

"We have this feature that our code utilizes. If it is not working
correctly, then we can expect our code that depends on it would not
work, and it is no use testing" is what the test prerequisite system
tries to achieve.  That is quite different from "the frotz feature
could work here as we see a binary /usr/bin/frotz installed, so
let's go test our code that depends on it---we'll find out if the
installed frotz is not what we expect, or way too old to help our
code, as the test will break and let us notice."