Re: [PATCH v1 2/2] travis-ci: disable GIT_TEST_HTTPD for macOS

[Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com>]

On 10 Nov 2016, at 17:10, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 12:07:14PM +0100, Lars Schneider wrote:
> 
>>> Using Apache in the tests has been the source of frequent portability
>>> problems and configuration headaches. I do wonder if we'd be better off
>>> using some small special-purpose web server (even a short perl script
>>> written around HTTP::Server::Simple or something).
>>> 
>>> On the other hand, testing against Apache approximates a more real-world
>>> case, which has value. It might be nice if our tests supported multiple
>>> web servers, but that would mean duplicating the config for each
>>> manually.
>> 
>> I agree that the real-world Apache test is more valuable and I really want
>> to keep the Linux Apache test running. However, I don't think many people
>> use macOS as Git web server and therefore I thought it is not worth the
>> effort to investigate this problem further.
> 
> IMHO, the value in the http tests is not testing the server side, but
> the client side. Without being able to set up a dummy HTTP server, we do
> not have any way to exercise the client side of git-over-http at all.
> And people on macOS _do_ use that. :)

Well, I haven't seen it from that perspective, yet, but I agree :-)


To all macOS users on the list:
Does anyone execute the tests with GIT_TEST_HTTPD enabled successfully?


There would be an alternative way to approach the problem:
Someone (GitHub?, BitBucket?, GitLab?, ...) could setup a bunch of webservers
with popular configurations and a way to reset a clean test environment. Then 
the TravisCI client tests could go against these servers.

I realize that this idea is probably unrealistic because too much setup and
maintenance work would be required.

Cheers,
Lars