Subject: Re: [PATCH] tests: send "bug in the test script" errors to the script's stderr

From: SZEDER Gábor <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2018 13:09:57 +0100

On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 05:58:25AM -0500, Jeff King wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 05:45:28AM -0500, Jeff King wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 12:34:04AM +0100, SZEDER Gábor wrote:
> > 
> > > > I do notice that many of the existing "FATAL:" errors use descriptor 5,
> > > > which goes to stdout. I'm not sure if those should actually be going to
> > > > stderr (or if there's some TAP significance to those lines).
> > > 
> > > I chose to send these messages to standard error, because they are,
> > > well, errors.  TAP only cares about stdout, but by aborting the test
> > > script in BUG(), error() or die() we are already violating TAP anyway,
> > > so I don't think it matters whether we send "bug in test script" or
> > > "FATAL" errors to stdout or stderr.
> > 
> > Yeah, I agree it probably doesn't matter. I was mostly suggesting to
> > make the existing ">&5" into ">&7" for consistency. But I don't think
> > that needs to block your patch.
> 
> By the way, I did check to see whether this might help the situation
> where running under "prove" we see only "Dubious..." and not the actual
> error() message produced by the test script. But no, it eats both stdout
> and stderr. You can sneak a line through by prepending it with "#", but
> only if "prove -o" is used (and even then, it's hard to associate it
> with a particular test when you're running many in parallel).

Just to be clear: I don't mind if in some combination of test
harnesses and test options a "bug in the test script" message doesn't
reach the terminal as long as I get a clearly visible error from
somewhere.

> So I guess the status quo is not too bad: prove says "dubious", and then
> you re-run the test with "./t1234-foo.sh -v -i" and you get to see the
> error.

And with '--verbose-log' the "bug in the test script" message goes to
the test's log as well, even when it has to go through fd 7 first, so
if you use 'prove' and your GIT_TEST_OPTS includes '--verbose-log'
then you can just look at the log, there's no need to re-run the test.