Subject: Re: [PATCH 07/15] remote-mediawiki tests: guard test_cmp with test_path_is_file

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2020 10:54:16 +0200

On Wed, Sep 16 2020, Eric Sunshine wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 8:17 AM Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> Change a test that used a plain test_cmp to first check the file(s)
>> using test_path_is_file. If some of these file(s) don't exist (as
>> happened to me during debugging), test_cmp will emit a way less useful
>> message about the failure.
>
> An alternative would be to update test_cmp() to present a more helpful
> error message so that all test scripts can benefit rather than just
> this script. By the way, were you testing with a reasonably recent
> version of Git? I ask because test_cmp() was updated not long ago to
> provide better diagnostics when one of the files is missing.
>
> [1]: d572f52a64 (test_cmp: diagnose incorrect arguments, 2020-08-09)

Thanks (and also to Đoàn Trần Công Danh in a side-thread). I've dropped
this patch. It's indeed better to leave this to a more general facility
as in your now-integrated test_cmp patch.

The reason I came up with this now-useless patch is because I originally
started hacking this series on a slightly older version of git, which
didn't have that patch.