Re: Test failures with GNU grep 2.23

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 07:23:11PM +0000, John Keeping wrote:

> I suspect that any grep that lacks "-a" also lacks binary file handling
> that will break these tests.  I found a Solaris grep that doesn't
> support "-a" and it treats these files as text.
> 
> From that perspective, it would be better to have a central place that
> deals with figuring out how to get grep to work for us.  Perhaps we need
> test_grep to get this right.  We already have test_cmp_bin() as a thin
> wrapper around cmp so I don't think this is completely unprecedented.

I think 99% of the time we are using grep for ascii text. As evidenced
by the number of test failures we see with the new grep, it is a small
minority that feed binary gibberish. I'd prefer if "-a" handling didn't
need to pollute anything outside of this narrow range of tests (and as
with my prereq suggestion, I am even find just skipping this narrow
range of tests on platforms with no "-a", though falling back to running
without "-a" is fine if it works).

-Peff