Re: Use mongoose to test smart-http unconditionally?

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Dec 04, 2013 at 02:53:13PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> If it involves making things not tested with apache, I'd actually be
> less supportive for the whole plan.

I hadn't really considered that angle. Apache is a much more realistic
real-world deployment. We give advice for it in git-http-backend(1), and
the tests do check that that advice works (OTOH, we also give advice for
lighttpd, but that is not checked in the test scripts).

> I thought the primary objective was to encourage people who currently
> are _not_ running httpd tests by making a lightweight server available
> out of the box, robbing an excuse "my box does not have apache
> installed" from them.

Whether we get rid of apache or not, I think a new lightweight server
would fulfill that goal. I just did not want the maintenance burden of
managing multiple configs (and our test harness apache config has grown
non-trivial).

> As long as a server supports bog standard CGI interface, smart-http
> should work the same way with any such server.  For that reason, it
> should be theoretically sufficient to test with one non-apache
> server (i.e. mongoose) for the purpose of making sure _our_ end of
> the set-up works, but still...

There are definitely subtleties between servers. For example, when I
worked on fetching bundles over http a while back, there was a big
difference between lighttpd and apache. A request for
"http://example.com/foo.bundle/info/refs" would return the bundle under
lighttpd, but not under apache (for an apache server, we would have to
make a fallback request). The client needs to be able to handle both
scenarios gracefully.

That's a case where it would be nice to be able to test _both_ cases,
and that may be an argument for having multiple (or trying to configure
apache to do both behaviors). But it shows that there may be subtle
differences between a fake test server and a real deployment.

So thinking on it more, I'm somewhat less enthusiastic about mongoose.

-Peff