Re: [PATCH v7 2/3] unit tests: add TAP unit test framework

[phillip.wood123@gmail.com]

Hi Junio

On 22/09/2023 21:05, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> It seems this got stuck during Josh's absense and I didn't ping it
> further, but I should have noticed that you are the author of this
> patch, and pinged you in the meantime.

Sorry I meant to reply when I saw your first message but then didn't get 
round to it.

> Any thought on the "polarity" of the return values from the
> assertion?  I still find it confusing and hard to follow.

When I was writing this I was torn between whether to follow our usual 
convention of returning zero for success and minus one for failure or to 
return one for success and zero for failure. In the end I decided to go 
with the former but I tend to agree with you that the latter would be 
easier to understand.

>>> +test_expect_success 'TAP output from unit tests' '
>>> [...]
>>> +	ok 19 - test with no checks returns -1
>>> +	1..19
>>> +	EOF
>>
>> Presumably t-basic will serve as a catalog of check_* functions and
>> the test binary, together with this test piece, will keep growing as
>> we gain features in the unit tests infrastructure.  I wonder how
>> maintainable the above is, though.  When we acquire new test, we
>> would need to renumber.  What if multiple developers add new
>> features to the catalog at the same time?

I think we could just add new tests to the end so we'd only need to 
change the "1..19" line. That will become a source of merge conflicts if 
multiple developers add new features at the same time though. Having 
several unit test programs called from separate tests in t0080 might 
help with that.

>>> diff --git a/t/unit-tests/.gitignore b/t/unit-tests/.gitignore
>>> new file mode 100644
>>> index 0000000000..e292d58348
>>> --- /dev/null
>>> +++ b/t/unit-tests/.gitignore
>>> @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
>>> +/t-basic
>>> +/t-strbuf
>>
>> Also, can we come up with some naming convention so that we do not
>> have to keep adding to this file every time we add a new test
>> script?

Perhaps we should put the unit test binaries in a separate directory so 
we can just add that directory to .gitignore.

Best Wishes

Phillip