Re: [PATCH] grep: Don't pass a TODO test if REG_STARTEND is supported

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> Well to clarify: The TAP is arguably right, although semantically
> these sort of tests should probably be a SKIP on unsupported
> platforms, not a passing TODO.

No, we support all platforms people are willing to fix without
uglifying the code too much.  So a bug is a bug.  Test
prerequisites get used for behavior that is either out of scope
(Posix-style permissions on Windows) or hard to test (signal
delivery to child process in t7502-commit).

The semantic problem you are describing here is that we have no
separate way to mark bugs that are not consistently reproducible.
A “fixed” test_expect_failure is sometimes a fluke, like in this
example.

If lucky, you can find an appropriate condition and use
test_expect_success or test_expect_failure as appropriate.  In
the general case, that is not always easy.  Better to eliminate the
unreproducible bugs.

> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 18:44, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote:

>> We should also just upgrade the GNU regex library in compat/regex to
>> the version that supports REG_STARTEND.
[...]
> This is what we should be focusing on

By the way, I have no preference for choice of regex library here.  If
something else is easier to get working correctly, that would be great.