Re: [PATCH] t/Makefile: retain cache t/.prove across prove runs

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 05:31:52PM +0200, mhagger@alum.mit.edu wrote:

> prove(1) can write a summary of its test results and timings into a
> cache file, t/.prove, then use this information during later runs for
> various purposes.  But deleting t/.prove after every test run defeats
> this purpose.  So do not delete t/.prove as part of "make
> DEFAILT_TEST_TARGET=prove test".  (Continue to delete the file on
> "make clean".)

Thanks. I had found some odd behaviors with putting "--state" into
GIT_PROVE_OPTS when I first switched my setup to use prove, but I didn't
investigate. I think this issue explained some of what I saw.

Do note, though, that we only clean ".prove" on a successful run. So
something like "--state=hot,save" will still see the cache from the last
run if there were failures. However, the prove cache is meant to be kept
across many runs, even successful ones, so I think your patch makes
sense.

> ---
> prove(1) can be told to retain information about test runs, and to use
> it for interesting purposes during future invocations.  For example,
> it can be told to run tests that failed during the last run:
> 
>     GIT_PROVE_OPTS = --state=failed,save

I don't think this actually works, because we also feed all of the test
scripts to prove on the command line. So it will run them all, both
failed and successful.

I'm not sure if it is worth solving for "make test". I suspect having
that not test everything would be error prone (i.e., it's too easy to
accidentally not run the full suite when you meant to, and unexpected
regressions in other tests will go unnoticed). You can always run
"prove" yourself from the command line, or we can add a new target to do
a partial test (with other options set up properly).

-Peff