Subject: [PATCH] test-lib: make '--stress' more bisect-friendly

From: SZEDER Gábor <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2019 12:50:45 +0100

Let's suppose that a test somehow becomes flaky between 'master' and
'pu', and tends to fail within the first 50 repetitions when run with
'--stress'.  In such a case we could use 'git bisect' to find the
culprit: if the test script fails with '--stress', then the commit is
definitely bad, but if it survives, say, 300 repetitions, then we could
consider it good with reasonable confidence.

Unfortunately, all this could only be done manually, because
'--stress' would run the test script repeatedly for all eternity on a
good commit, and it would exit with success even when it found a
failure on a bad commit.

So let's make '--stress' usable with 'git bisect run':

  - Make it exit with failure if a failure is found.

  - Add the '--stress-limit=<N>' option to repeat the test script
    at most N times in each of the parallel jobs, and exit with
    success when the limit is reached.

And then we could simply run something like:

  $ git bisect start origin/pu master
  $ git bisect run sh -c 'make && cd t &&
                          ./t1234-foo.sh --stress --stress-limit=300'

Sure, as a brand new feature it won't be any useful right now, but in
a release or three most cooking topics will already contain this, so
we could automatically bisect at least newly introduced flakiness.

Signed-off-by: SZEDER Gábor <[email-masked]>
---

This is a case when an external stress script works better, as it can
easily check commits in the past...  if someone has such a script,
that is.

Anyway, the approach works:

  https://public-inbox.org/git/[email-masked]/
  https://public-inbox.org/git/[email-masked]/

 t/README      |  5 +++++
 t/test-lib.sh | 18 ++++++++++++++++--
 2 files changed, 21 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/t/README b/t/README
index 11ce7675e3..3aed321248 100644
--- a/t/README
+++ b/t/README
@@ -202,6 +202,11 @@ appropriately before running "make".
 	'.stress-<nr>' suffix, and the trash directory of the failed
 	test job is renamed to end with a '.stress-failed' suffix.
 
+--stress-limit=<N>::
+	When combined with --stress run the test script repeatedly
+	this many times in each of the parallel jobs or until one of
+	them fails, whichever comes first.
+
 You can also set the GIT_TEST_INSTALLED environment variable to
 the bindir of an existing git installation to test that installation.
 You still need to have built this git sandbox, from which various
diff --git a/t/test-lib.sh b/t/test-lib.sh
index a1abb1177a..77eff04c92 100644
--- a/t/test-lib.sh
+++ b/t/test-lib.sh
@@ -152,6 +152,17 @@ do
 			;;
 		esac
 		;;
+	--stress-limit=*)
+		stress_limit=${opt#--*=}
+		case "$stress_limit" in
+		*[^0-9]*|0*|"")
+			echo "error: --stress-limit=<N> requires the number of repetitions" >&2
+			exit 1
+			;;
+		*)	# Good.
+			;;
+		esac
+		;;
 	*)
 		echo "error: unknown test option '$opt'" >&2; exit 1 ;;
 	esac
@@ -237,8 +248,10 @@ then
 				exit 1
 			' TERM INT
 
-			cnt=0
-			while ! test -e "$stressfail"
+			cnt=1
+			while ! test -e "$stressfail" &&
+			      { test -z "$stress_limit" ||
+				test $cnt -le $stress_limit ; }
 			do
 				$TEST_SHELL_PATH "$0" "$@" >"$TEST_RESULTS_BASE.stress-$job_nr.out" 2>&1 &
 				test_pid=$!
@@ -261,6 +274,7 @@ then
 
 	if test -f "$stressfail"
 	then
+		stress_exit=1
 		echo "Log(s) of failed test run(s):"
 		for failed_job_nr in $(sort -n "$stressfail")
 		do
-- 
2.20.1.940.g8404bb2d1a