[PATCH v2 2/2] t7900: fix flaky "maintenance.strategy" test
From: Patrick Steinhardt <hidden>
Date: 2026-08-12 10:12:05
Subsystem:
the rest · Maintainer:
Linus Torvalds
One of our tests for whether "maintenance.strategy" is being respected
in t7900 is flaky in our CI systems:
+ GIT_TRACE2_EVENT=/tmp/test-output/trash directory.t7900-maintenance/repo/trace2.txt git -c maintenance.strategy=incremental maintenance run --quiet
+ test_maintenance_tasks trace2.txt
+ cat
+ sed -ne s/.*"region_enter".*"category":"maintenance\([^"]*\)".*"label":"\([^"][^"]*\)".*/\2\1/p trace2.txt
+ test_cmp expect actual
+ test 2 -ne 2
+ eval /usr/bin/diff -u "$@"
+ /usr/bin/diff -u expect actual
--- expect 2026-08-07 06:20:51.388322602 +0000
+++ actual 2026-08-07 06:20:51.388322602 +0000
@@ -1,2 +0,0 @@
-gc foreground
-gc
When running with the "incremental" strategy, we expect two git-gc(1)
tasks to have been executed, but sometimes the test simply doesn't
execute any of those tasks.
A first hunch may be that maybe the disk-state is sometimes different
and thus we decide not to run maintenance. But git-maintenance(1)
doesn't run with the "--auto" switch, so we should execute those tasks
regardless of the on-disk state.
But there's a second condition that may cause us to not execute tasks,
namely when the "maintenance.lock" file exists due to a concurrently
running git-maintenance(1) process. We usually disable auto-maintenance
from detaching in our test suite to avoid exactly these kinds of race
conditions by exporting `GIT_TEST_MAINT_AUTO_DETACH=false`. But in t7900
we unset "GIT_TEST_MAINT_AUTO_DETACH" and thus enable the auto-detach
logic. The intent of this is to exercise git-maintenance(1) closer to
how it would run in a real-world scenario, but it does cause us to race
when the detached maintenance job that was triggered by `test_commit()`
lives long enough.
We could trivially fix this race by disabling auto-maintenance for this
specific test. But that doesn't fix this class of races in this test
suite: while I haven't seen any of the other tests fail in the same way,
a bunch of them have this race, as well.
Instead, let's retain "GIT_TEST_MAINT_AUTO_DETACH" and only unset it as
required.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <redacted>
---
t/t7900-maintenance.sh | 6 +++---
1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
diff --git a/t/t7900-maintenance.sh b/t/t7900-maintenance.sh
index 6735a9e082..5fbb16f0f0 100755
--- a/t/t7900-maintenance.sh
+++ b/t/t7900-maintenance.sh@@ -7,9 +7,6 @@ test_description='git maintenance builtin' GIT_TEST_COMMIT_GRAPH=0 GIT_TEST_MULTI_PACK_INDEX=0 -# Ensure that auto-maintenance detaches as usual. -sane_unset GIT_TEST_MAINT_AUTO_DETACH - test_lazy_prereq XMLLINT ' xmllint --version '
@@ -71,6 +68,7 @@ test_expect_success 'maintenance.auto config option' ' git init repo && ( cd repo && + sane_unset GIT_TEST_MAINT_AUTO_DETACH && GIT_TRACE2_EVENT="$(pwd)/default" git commit --quiet --allow-empty -m 1 && test_subcommand git maintenance run --auto --quiet --detach <default &&
@@ -90,6 +88,7 @@ test_expect_success 'gc.auto config option' ' git init repo && ( cd repo && + sane_unset GIT_TEST_MAINT_AUTO_DETACH && GIT_TRACE2_EVENT="$(pwd)/default" git commit --quiet --allow-empty -m 1 && test_subcommand git maintenance run --auto --quiet --detach <default &&
@@ -107,6 +106,7 @@ test_expect_success 'maintenance.auto overrides gc.auto' ' git init repo && ( cd repo && + sane_unset GIT_TEST_MAINT_AUTO_DETACH && git config set maintenance.auto false && git config set gc.auto 1 &&
--
2.55.0.679.g6767b8d81c.dirty