Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 01/18] maintenance: create basic maintenance runner

From: Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2020 16:01:34 -0700

Taylor Blau wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 03, 2020 at 10:46:54AM -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> Derrick Stolee wrote:
>>> On 7/30/2020 8:30 PM, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>>>> Derrick Stolee wrote:

>>>>> If there is a better way to ask "Did my command call 'git gc' (with
>>>>> no arguments|with these arguments)?" then I'm happy to consider it.
>>>>
>>>> My proposal was just to factor this out into a function in
>>>> test-lib-functions.sh so it's easy to evolve over time in one place.
>>>
>>> This is a valuable suggestion, but this series is already too large
>>> to make such a change in addition to the patches already here.
>>
>> Hm, it's not clear to me that this would make the series significantly
>> larger.
>
> I think what Stolee is trying to say is less about a change that would
> make the series larger, it's about changing an already-large series.
>
>> And on the contrary, it would make the code less fragile.  I think this
>> is important.
>
> I'm not sure that I see your argument. What we are really discussing is
> whether or not we should have a static struct outside of 'cmd_gc()', or
> a zero-initialized frame local struct within 'cmd_gc()'. I fully
> understand the arguments in favor of one or the other, but I struggle to
> grasp that this is worth our time to debate in this much detail.

Sorry for the lack of clarity.  The proposal Stolee is pushing back on
above is to have a helper in test-lib-functions.sh that tells a test
whether an event it cares about happened in traces (in this example,
invocation of "git gc").

I consider it important because if we are getting into the habit of
having our tests assume the current exact byte-for-byte trace JSON
output, then that is an assumption that is going to be painful to
unravel.  Factoring out a helper would also make the test easier to
read, but that is less important than "an ounce of prevention is worth
a pound of cure" to me in this example.

Jonathan