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

[Douglas Bagnall]

hi Ralph,

On 02/06/17 18:50, Ralph Böhme via samba-technical wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 02, 2017 at 04:31:02PM +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.
> 
> I generally like the idea, but can we keep the existing selftest/knownfail file
> in place and not move it into the knownfail.d directory? That would make it work
> like all the other kids like cron handle this.

I think the attached version does that.

It doesn't complicate the selftest code as much as I feared and I can see the
benefit of not having to remember where knownfail moved to.

cheers,
Douglas

> 
> Cheerio!
> -slow
> 

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