Re: [PATCH] t7800 readlink not found

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

Torsten Bögershausen <tboegi@web.de> writes:

>> diff --git a/t/t7800-difftool.sh b/t/t7800-difftool.sh
>> index 7ce4cd7..905035c 100755
>> --- a/t/t7800-difftool.sh
>> +++ b/t/t7800-difftool.sh
>> @@ -446,7 +446,7 @@ write_script .git/CHECK_SYMLINKS <<\EOF
>>   for f in file file2 sub/sub
>>   do
>>   	echo "$f"
>> -	readlink "$2/$f"
>> +	ls -ld "$2/$f" | sed -e 's/.* -> //'
>>   done >actual
>>   EOF
>>
> I don't know how portable #ls -ld" really is.

The parts with mode bits, nlinks, uid, gid, size, and date part do
have some variations.  For example, we have been burned on ACL
enabled systems having some funny suffix after the usual mode bits
stuff.

However, as far as this test is concerned, I do not think "how
portable is the output from ls -ld" is an especially relevant
question.  None of the things we expect early in the output (the
fields I enumerated in the previous paragraph) would contain " -> ".
And we know that we do not use a filename that has " -> " (or "->")
as a substring in our tests.

We don't have to use readlink, even on platforms where we do have
readlink.  Building the conditional to be checked at runtime and
providing a shell function read_link that uses "ls -ld | sed" or
"readlink" depending on the runtime check is wasteful.