Re: git-2.55.0-rc1 t4216 broken TAP failures on non-x86 arch

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> writes:

>> Building git-2.55.0-rc1 today, all non-x86 architectures
>> failed with:
>>  ...
>> This looks like it comes from the following chunk of code in
>> the test:
>> 
>>     # expect will not match actual if char is unsigned by default. Write the test
>>     # in this way, so that a user running this test script can still see if the two
>>     # files match. (It will appear as an ordinary success if they match, and a skip
>>     # if not.)
>>     if test_cmp highbit1/expect highbit1/actual
>>     then
>> 	    test_set_prereq SIGNED_CHAR_BY_DEFAULT
>>     fi
>>     test_expect_success SIGNED_CHAR_BY_DEFAULT 'check value of version 1 changed-path' '
>> 	    # Only the prereq matters for this test.
>> 	    true
>>     '

The "problematic" part is from mid 2024, so it is not anything new
in 2.55-rc1, is it?  Nobody built and ran tests for the past two
years on non-x86 boxes?

> Hm, this thing is indeed somewhat puzzling to me. I assume the intent is
> to give the developer some information that their platform is using
> signed characters by default? Other than that it's not really doing
> anything, as the prereq is only used by the one test shown above. I hope
> that Taylor has some more insight here.
>
> There's two potential fixes:
>
>   - We can just drop this completely, as it ultimately doesn't even end
>     up doing anything.
>
>   - We can convert the call to `test_cmp` into a `test_lazy_prereq`,
>     like done in the below patch, which retains the current behaviour.

Yeah, unless Taylor can tell us something we are not seeing, I am
inclined to say that we can just get rid of the whole thing.
SIGNED_CHAR_BY_DEFAULT is not used anywhere else, and the only place
it is used isd to run "true".