Re: [PATCH/RFC] test-lib: clean up trash* directories on SIGINT

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 06:16, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Ævar,
>
> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
>
>> Unless that's due to some unreproducable heisenbug you could get the
>> trash directory by running the test with --debug.
>
> So what should I do after noticing a heisenbug?

Run the test again with --debug. The test library and the commands
it's calling don't live in the same address space. A "heisenbug" will
probably be just as reproducable with --debug and without --debug.

>> These trash directories are explicitly temporary, and
>> should be cleaned up as the shell exists.
>
> When tests learned to remove the trash directory in test_done in
> v1.6.1-rc1~336^2~1 (Enable parallel tests, 2008-08-08), that was not
> the rationale; it was rather to avoid too many trash directories
> piling up.  If a test exits by mistake with ‘exit’ or fails with ‘-i’,
> the one or two scratch directories involved are still kept for
> debugging.

That's the original rationale, which is fair enough. I think the
behavior should be to clean up temporary files when the test exits,
not just when it's done executing.

> So you can see why a person would be reluctant to change this for
> aesthetic reasons only.

The reason I want to change it is that as I'm hacking Git I often run
the tests but kill them before they've completed, because if I'm
e.g. testing the test library itself I'm content with having only 10
tests pass before I continue improving it.

If I keep doing that (along with --jobs 20 and --shuffle) I'll
eventually pile up ~200 MB of trash. That'll exceed the limits of my
ramdisk and I'll have to grudgingly do rm -rf trash* again.

But maybe people such as yourself depend on the current behavior with
regards to SIGINT. I don't feel strongly about it, and having to
remove trash is a minor annoyance.

If it's being used it should be kept. I just assumed that it was an
omission in the cleanup routines.