Subject: Re: [BUG/WIP PATCH] unit-tests: use clean test environment

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2025 11:33:21 +0100

On Fri, Feb 28, 2025 at 06:15:42AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]> writes:
> > I suspect that most environment variables shouldn't matter (for now), so
> > overall the duplication may be acceptable:
> >
> >   - We need to unset a couple of variables, but we can probably reuse
> >     logic `git rev-parse --local-env-vars`.
> >
> >   - We need to ask Git to not read the configuration, which we can do by
> >     setting a couple of envvars. This should be manageable.
> 
> "Provide a controlled environment where Git pretends this is the
> $HOME and that is the $AUTHOR_NAME and so on" is much more
> preferrable than "Tell it not to read", no?

Maybe. I guess for unit tests it's a lot less clear cut as most of the
tests won't depend on such a controlled environment. So sanitizing the
environment would be a good enough first step for me, and if we see
demand for making specific information available to lots of tests we
could still start to expose those at a later point.

Of course, if the author already wants to do both steps right now I
won't complain :)

Patrick