Subject: Re: [PATCH 08/16] t5304: use helper to report failure of "test foo = bar"

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 13:35:15 -0700

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Tue, Oct 07, 2014 at 10:29:59AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> ...
>> The function is similar to test_cmp which takes two files but takes
>> two strings, so "test_cmp_str" or something perhaps (we already have
>> test_cmp_rev to compare two revisions, and the suggested name
>> follows that pattern)?
>
> Based on your responses, I'm leaning towards:
>
>   test_cmp_str() {
> 	test "$@" && return 0
> 	echo >&2 "command failed: test $*"
> 	return 1
>   }
>
> since the point is really just to print _something_ when the test fails
> (any quoting or whitespace may be wrong, of course, but that's OK; it's
> for human consumption, and is just a hint).

Yeah, if we are going to reduce it down to the above implementation,
intereseting things like "test -f $frotz" will become possible and
"cmp-str" stops making sense.  It really is about "We run test and
expect it to yield true.  Report the failure a bit more prominently
under the '-v' option to help us debug".

So among the ones you listed, test_verbose may be the least silly, I
would think.