Re: [PATCH] t6024-recursive-merge.sh: hide spurious output when not running verbosely

["Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 03:50:03PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> > Actually, I think this might be a bit more sensible approach.
> > 
> > -- >8 --
> > tests: allow optional clean-up phrase to expect_success/failure
> > 
> > When one test modifies the state of the test repository that the later
> > tests may depend on, you may want to add a clean-up action that is run
> > regardless of the outcome of the main part of the test.
> 
> I think your heart is in the right place with this patch, but I doubt
> that it is going to be all that productive in practice. Most tests
> consist of a long list of commands, and cleaning up properly after every
> possible failure case is going to be a lot of work. And worse, since the
> tests generally _don't_ fail, you have no way to test that your cleanup
> is reasonable.
> 
> So I think we will end up in the case where a few failed tests will
> properly clean themselves up and let further tests proceed, but most
> failures will leave a big question. In other words, what problem have we
> solved?  If tests N and N+k both fail, would you, even with this patch,
> suspect N+k of actually failing, or would you first go and debug test N?
> Is that any different than what you do now?

I agree with Jeff.  It is unnecessary complexity that won't be
tested well enough to be worthwhile.

This is why when tests start to fail I just rerun the specific case
with "-i -v" and let the test stop on the first failure, *fix that
one case* and run again to see if anything else is going to barf.

-- 
Shawn.