Re: [PATCH] Round-down years in "years+months" relative date view

[Alex Riesen <raa.lkml@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 19:15, Jeff King<peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 07:00:59PM +0200, Alex Riesen wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 17:02, Jeff King<peff@peff.net> wrote:
>> > But that's the point: you can't do that without a race condition. Your
>> > test gets a sense of the current time, then runs git, which checks the
>> > current time again. How many seconds elapsed between the two checks?
>>
>> How _many_ do you need?
>
> I don't understand what you're trying to say. My point is that if you
> are checking results to a one-second precision, you need to know whether
> zero seconds elapsed, or one second, or two seconds, or whatever to get
> a consistent result.

Taking this particular case as an example, can't we just set the time
of the _commit_ back in time? We can.
And we don't need to know the difference precisely, it can be
something like /[0-9]+ ago/, can't it?
Ok, it is possible, that something goes terribly wrong and the test suite
freezes for an extended period of time, so the pattern above does
not apply anymore. In this case, wont you prefer the test suite to
break? Ok, maybe not, if the freeze was an Ctrl-Z pressed at
unlucky moment. Which involves an operator online and looking,
and action and reaction will be both visible.

So, yes, it is not absolutely safe, but this approach has no side effects
on the working code. And very low probability of something go wrong.