Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/6] test: make the test suite work with zsh

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2023 20:15:48 -0700

"brian m. carlson" <[email-masked]> writes:

>> While these patches may make it "work" with zsh in its native mode,
>> because zsh that is running in its native mode is sufficiently
>> distant from the more POSIXy portable variants of Bourne shells like
>> dash and bash, I find it hard to justify the cost of maintaining the
>> resulting codebase to "work" that way.
>
> I think that's a fine position to take.  We have found some fun bugs in
> our testsuite via zsh's sh mode, and zsh (in sh mode) is a valid shell
> according to Debian's /bin/sh rules, so I think it's fair to address
> shell fixes for it in sh mode where we can, even though it sounds like
> we'd prefer to skip the zsh mode.

Yeah, as long as the sh mode is sufficiently compatible, I would be
happy to see the shell supported as one of the /bin/sh we can use,
and I agree that it is fair to address shell portability fixes for
zsh running in the sh compatible mode.

If the native mode didn't impose too much burden on our developers'
to maintain, it would have been nicer, but judging from the contents
of these patches, I am afraid that it falls on the other side of the
line.

Thanks.