[PATCH] reduce churn-induced conflicts in selftest/knownfail and flapping

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2017-06-02 at 16:31 +1200, Douglas Bagnall via samba-technical
wrote:
> Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of entries in selftest/knownfail:
> the "WONTFIX-at-least-not-today" lines (some apparently dating from
> 2008), and the "proof of fix" lines that are added and removed at either
> end of a changeset to demonstrate a decrease in brokenness. Both kinds
> are often added to the end of the knownfail file, which is a natural
> thing to do given it has no intrinsic order. This leads to a lot of
> flickering activity that causes git conflicts when in semantic terms
> there is no conflict (it's an unordered set of lines).
> 
> This patch makes the subunit framework look at all files in
> selftest/knownfail.d/ and treat them as if they were one. The intention
> is that long-lived entries can reside in selftest/knownfail.d/knownfail,
> and the fleeting ones can come and go in arbitrarily named files in that
> directory. For example (taken from the probable near future), supposing
> I was fixing a problem with the way we handle single value constraints
> in linked attributes, I could add tests and a knownfail file called
> selftest/knownfail.d/ldap-linked-attributes (I wish I could say the name
> was intentionally imperfect to show it doesn't really matter). Then a
> few patches latter when all is good, I would remove the file but leave
> the tests. We can all add fleeting knownfails with little risk of
> clashes.
> 
> This retains the benefit of the tests-first, proof-of-previous-failure
> approach without the version control nuisance.
> 
> The same argument follows for selftest/flapping, although that sees a
> bit less activity.

Thank you so much for tackling this irritant in our processes and
helping to make Samba development a little less annoying for all of us.

Reviewed-by: Andrew Bartlett <abartlet at samba.org> 

I've pushed it to autobuild.

Thanks!

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                       http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          http://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba