Re: [PATCH 5/9] update-index: add --checkout/--no-checkout to update CE_NO_CHECKOUT bit

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 10:26:48PM +0700, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:

> Thanks for catching. The last half also has the same problem. Another

I'm not sure what you mean by "the last half also has the same problem";
with the patch I posted (or Junio's patch) the test works fine for me.

> way is maybe just stay away for those numbers, naming the files by
> alphabet. Just wonder if we could have some ways to automatically
> catch this kind of bug in the future.

Dscho suggested something similar. I would be happy if somebody wrote a
portability lint that found problems in shell constructs and calling
conventions of tools. In practice, though, I think it ends up being
quite hard to catalog all of the quirks of every platform (and
certainly, I would never have thought that this would break -- as it
was, after it _did_ break I had to sit scratching my head wondering how
that piece of code could be wrong).

So I think a simpler approach makes sense: write tests that make sure
the system is doing what you want, and then run those tests periodically
in the environments that you care about checking. When it breaks, you
know there is a problem. :) And that is exactly how this bug was caught.

-Peff