Re: [PATCH v2 4/4] t/Makefile: introduce TEST_SHELL_PATH

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> I'm not sure that's true. Look at what already goes into
> GIT-BUILD-OPTIONS: TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY, GIT_TEST_CMP, GIT_PERF_*, etc.
>
> Interestingly, many of those do something like this in the Makefile:
>
>   ifdef GIT_TEST_CMP
> 	@echo GIT_TEST_OPTS=... >>$@+
>   endif
>
> which seems utterly confusing to me. Because it means that if you build
> with those options set, then they will override anything in the
> environment. But if you don't, then you _may_ override them in the
> environment. In other words:
>
>   make
>   cd t
>   GIT_TEST_CMP=foo ./t0000-*
>
> will respect that variable. But:
>
>   make GIT_TEST_CMP=foo
>   cd t
>   GIT_TEST_CMP=bar ./t0000-*
>
> will not. Which seems weird.  But I guess we could follow that pattern
> with TEST_SHELL_PATH.

Or perhaps we can start setting a better example with the new
variable, and migrate those weird existing ones over to the new way
of not forbidding run-time overriding?

There is a long outstanding NEEDSWORK comment in help.c that wonders
if we want to embed contents from GIT-BUILD-OPTIONS in the resulting
binary, and the distinction Dscho brought up between "build" and
"test" phases would start to matter even more once we go in that
direction.