Subject: Re: [PATCH] tests: fix tests broken under GETTEXT_POISON=YesPlease

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2017 21:11:20 -0700

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]> writes:

> My general approach when writing & maintaining this poison has been
> that it's fine if we skip some tests, even though we could be bending
> over backwards to run them, or even if we don't know the root cause
> beyond "the rebase machinery is always broken with poison".
>
> This is because once I'm satisfied that the breaking test isn't
> because of some new plumbing message that got i18n'd I don't see the
> point of keeping digging, it's fine to just skip the test, because we
> run it when we're not under poison, and we're satisfied that it's not
> breaking because of a new plumbing message being i18n'd we've
> fulfilled the entire reason for why this poison facility exists in the
> first place.

As to skipping tests, I am worried mostly because it is very easy to
mark one test as skipped under poison build, even where the side
effect from that test left behind in the trash repository is a
prerequisite for a later test to succeed.  For example, a test that
creates a tag may be marked as skipped-under-poison.  Then a new
test that is added to such a test may want to do something using
that tag, and it will succeed in the usual test.  As most people do
not test poison build, when somebody notices that the new test fails
under poison build, it is unclear if the breakage is due to new i18n
issues or something else, like a missing prerequisite tag due to
skipping an earlier test.