Subject: Re: [PATCH] t4013: add expected failure for "log --patch --no-patch"

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 May 2023 08:50:26 -0700

Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> writes:

> Sergey Organov <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> No problem from my side, but are you sure?
>
> Absolutely.
>
> I've seen people just say "we document a failed one" and leave it at
> that, without attempting to fix.  I am trying to see if pushing back
> at first would serve as a good way to encourage these known failure
> to be fixed, without accumulating too many expect_failure in our
> test suite, which will waste cycles at CI runs (which do not need to
> be reminded something is known to be broken).  I will try not to do
> this when I do not positively know the author of such a patch is
> capable enough to provide a fix, though, and you are unlucky enough
> to have shown your abilities in the past ;-)

I ended up spending some time digging history and remembered that
"--no-patch" was added as a synonym to "-s" by d09cd15d (diff: allow
--no-patch as synonym for -s, 2013-07-16).  These

    git diff -p --stat --no-patch HEAD^ HEAD
    git diff -p --raw --no-patch HEAD^ HEAD

would show no output from the diff machinery, patches, diffstats,
raw object names, etc.

And this turns out to be a prime example why the approach to ask
contributors do more, would help the project overall.  What I should
have done, instead of asking for the test with its expect_failure
turned into expect_success *and* a fix to the code to make the new
test work, was to ask to see if it is really a bug in the behaviour
or if the documentation is wrong.  Then your reaction wouldn't have
been "are you sure?".  It hopefully would have been "ah, the intent
is not documented correctly, and here is a documentation patch to
fix it."

When a command does not behave the way one thinks it should, being
curious is good.  Reporting it as a potential bug is also good.  But
it would help the project more if it was triaged before reporting it
as a potential bug, if the reporter is capable of doing so.  Those
who encounter behaviour unexpected to them are more numerous than
those who can report it as a potential bug (many people are not
equipped to write a good bug report), and those who can triage and
diagnose a bug report are fewer.  Those who can come up with a
solution is even more scarse.

Thanks.