Re: [PATCH v3 3/7] unit-tests: add for_test

["René Scharfe" <l.s.r@web.de>]

Am 30.07.24 um 06:49 schrieb Patrick Steinhardt:
> On Mon, Jul 29, 2024 at 11:55:52AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> writes:
>>
>>> is standalone nowadays and called "clar" [1]. The biggest downside of it
>>> is that it depends on Python to auto-generate the test "main" function,
>>> which is not really a good fit for the Git project.
>>
>> Is that because Python is optional (like, we only use it for
>> optional Perforce thing and import-zip in contrib), or are there
>> other concerns?
>>
>> Unlike these components, unit tests are not even for the end-user
>> consumers, so if it is Python that you find it a blocker, I do not
>> see a reason to reject it.  The thing looked like a simple script
>> that does not use any tricky language construct or modules.
>
> No concerns other than adding another mandatory dependency for devs. We
> already depend on Perl and Shell, so adding Python to the stack feels
> suboptimal to me.
>
> As you say though, the script isn't all that involved. So it would also
> be possible to port it to Perl if we want to do that, I guess.

From the point of view of a "minimal C unit testing framework" surely
the implementation language with the best dependency story would be C.
Perhaps it could then also test itself.  On the other hand, writing a
string handling program in 2024 in C is probably not the smartest idea.

Then again, generate.py uses a non-greedy regex to remove single-line
comments, which seems wrong, and doesn't seem to support preprocessor
directives like #if and #ifdef, so whole tests can't be disabled this
way.  And it uses pickle to cache results; does that mean it would be
slow without it?  Anyway, point being that parsing C isn't so easy
using Python either.

René