Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 13/16] t1501: remove use of `test_might_fail cp`

From: Denton Liu <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2019 15:19:40 -0800

Hi Eric,

On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 05:52:56PM -0500, Eric Sunshine wrote:
> > diff --git a/t/t1501-work-tree.sh b/t/t1501-work-tree.sh
> > @@ -350,7 +350,7 @@ test_expect_success 'Multi-worktree setup' '
> >         cp repo.git/HEAD repo.git/index repo.git/repos/foo &&
> > -       test_might_fail cp repo.git/sharedindex.* repo.git/repos/foo &&
> > +       test_non_git_might_fail cp repo.git/sharedindex.* repo.git/repos/foo &&
> 
> I can't say I'm a fan of patch 1 introducing the function
> test_non_git_might_fail() for this one particular case. I'd rather see
> this case follow existing precedence by being written this way:
> 
>     { cp repo.git/sharedindex.* repo.git/repos/foo || :; } &&
> 
> which is the idiomatic way this sort of thing is handled in existing tests.
> 
> While it's true that it may look a bit cryptic to people new to shell
> scripting, as with any idiom, it's understood at a glance by people
> familiar with it. That bit about "at a glance" is important: it's much
> easier to comprehend idiomatic code than code which you have to spend
> a lot of time _reading_ (and "test_non_git_might_fail" is quite a
> mouthful, or eyeful, or something, which takes a lot more effort to
> read and understand).

The reason why I chose to do this was because I found myself writing the
above many times in (currently unsent) later test cases that I cleaned
up. As a result, I felt like it could be wrapped up more nicely with a
helper function. That being said, if you think that open coding the
idiom looks nicer, I can reroll to inline it.