Re: [PATCH 8/8] t/test-lib: make feature-testbed job more accessible

[Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2026 at 05:23:49PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2026 at 09:18:28AM +0100, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
> 
> > Due to the job being special it has a higher potential of failing even
> > though a local test run succeeds. But running these tests locally with
> > the same environment is somewhat painful, as the developer has to
> > manually set all of these environment variables.
> 
> OK. I've usually just cut-and-paste them, as my first step is figuring
> out which is the culprit anyway. My biggest question was: what if the
> culprit is a build flag, and indeed, we leave the one build flag here:
> 
> >  linux-feature-testbed)
> >  	export OPENSSL_SHA1_UNSAFE=YesPlease
> > -	export GIT_TEST_SPLIT_INDEX=yes
> > -	export GIT_TEST_FULL_IN_PACK_ARRAY=true
> > -	export GIT_TEST_OE_SIZE=10
> > -	export GIT_TEST_OE_DELTA_SIZE=5
> > -	export GIT_TEST_COMMIT_GRAPH=1
> > -	export GIT_TEST_COMMIT_GRAPH_CHANGED_PATHS=1
> > -	export GIT_TEST_MULTI_PACK_INDEX=1
> > -	export GIT_TEST_MULTI_PACK_INDEX_WRITE_INCREMENTAL=1
> > -	export GIT_TEST_NO_WRITE_REV_INDEX=1
> > -	export GIT_TEST_CHECKOUT_WORKERS=2
> > -	export GIT_TEST_PACK_USE_BITMAP_BOUNDARY_TRAVERSAL=1
> > +	GIT_TEST_OPTS="$GIT_TEST_OPTS --feature-testbed"
> 
> which makes this feature only half-work (well, 11/12 if we want to be
> pedantic).
> 
> IMHO this whole thing isn't really worth the complexity, but if we are
> going to do it, should it be "make FEATURE_TESTBED=1", and then that
> enables the right build knobs, and test-lib.sh respects that variable
> coming from BUILD-OPTIONS rather than the command line?

I dunno. Until now I've never had the case myself where the issue is
because of the above build flag, test errors were only ever caused by
one of the GIT_TEST variables. So what I typically want is to toggle
between GIT_TEST- and non-GIT_TEST test runs, and ideally without having
to recompile everything. And more often than not I want to only do this
for a single test file, only.

So I'm not much of a fan of moving this into our BUILD-OPTIONS, as it
would kind of defeat my own use case for it. I'm thus inclined to either
leave this as-is, or drop the patch altogether. I don't terribly mind
either of those outcomes.

Patrick