Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 1/2] untracked-cache: test untracked-cache-bypassing behavior with -uall

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2022 09:39:02 -0700

Tao Klerks <[email-masked]> writes:

> Sorry, I'm not completely sure whether my comment was misleading, or
> whether I'm misunderstanding your feedback.
>
> The test added here does not test "desirable" behavior from an
> end-user functional perspective, but it does test behavior that is
> working "as-designed" as of many years ago.

Is it "as-designed", or just "left buggy"?

I somehow had an impression that you meant the latter, and it would
be our aspirational goal to eventually fix it.  And for such case,
it would be better to write the test body to show what the command 
should do, which would make the test fail with today's Git, and mark
it as test_expect_failure (which is not an ideal mechanism to prepare
for a future fix, but that is what we have now and should use, until
a better alternative being worked on is finished).

But if it is "as-designed, some users may find it suboptimal or
confusing or with any other negative adjectives, but it is too late
to change now and more importantly it is unthinkable to change it
because existing tools and users do depend on the current behaviour",
then what you did is perfectly fine.

> The intent in adding this test is to ensure that if/when someone
> changes this behavior down the line, they be forced to understand the
> implications.

That, too.

Thanks.