Subject: Re: [PATCH] packed_ref_store: handle a packed-refs file that is a symlink

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Jun 2021 23:37:22 +0200

On Thu, Jun 03 2021, Jeff King wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 03, 2021 at 03:23:02PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>
>> Jeff King wrote:
>> > Preemptively finding portability problems may save work in the long
>> > term. And people may even be using Git on AIX and just ignoring test
>> > failures, or they have GNU coreutils installed anyway, etc. But it would
>> > also save work if we can ignore platforms that nobody uses.
>> 
>> I agree, but the Git project is overly preoccupied (IMO) with
>> hypothetical issues some hypothetical users might have in some
>> hypothetical situations, and that is used as a rationale to block changes
>> that would improve the experience of the vast majority of users.
>> 
>> This is not a hypothetical issue, and yet you are suggesting to
>> discount it?
>> 
>> I don't disagree, but this is not consistent.
>
> I don't think they're the same issue at all. One is: we have millions of
> users, and this change may affect some of them negatively, so we may
> want to err on the side of caution. The other is: this has been
> accidentally broken for four years and nobody complained, so perhaps
> nobody is actually using it.

Aside from AIX I think you're assuming less of a cowboy attitude among
packagers of these platforms than is the reality in the wild :)

I mean I don't blame them, git's just one thing they're packaging, and
e.g. on the BSD's or whatever this is just the Nth
Linux-toolchain-specific smelling test failure or issue they have that
day.

I have some incomplete work somewhere to slurp up all the package
sources I could find in the wild (SRPM's, Debian recipies etc.) and
their patches, the aim was to submit it into contrib/ so we could see
what monkeypatches to git.git existed in the wild.

Last time I looked at those (and this is from memory, and it was a while
ago) many of those patches / build recipies were simply blindly skipping
or otherwise working around test failures.

So we can't assume that failures in the wild are reported to us, and I
think many packagers are not running any of our tests at all. If it
compiles and seems to work they're probably just shipping it.