On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 02:22:14PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > On a local host, the object/history transport code often talks over > pipe with the other side. The other side may notice some (expected) > failure, send the error message either to our process or to the > standard error and hung up. In such codepaths, if timing were not > unfortunate, our side would receive the report of (expected) failure > from the other side over the pipe and die(). Otherwise, our side > may still be trying to talk to it and would die with a SIGPIPE. > > This was observed as an intermittent breakage in t5516 by a few > people. > > In the real-life scenario, either mode of death exits with a > non-zero status, and the user would learn that the command failed. > The test_must_fail helper should also know that dying with SIGPIPE > is one of the valid failure modes when we are expecting the tested > operation to notice problem and fail. Sorry for the slow review; before commenting I wanted to dig into whether this SIGPIPE ambiguity was avoidable in the first place. I think the answer is "probably not". We do call write_or_die() pretty consistently in the network-aware programs. So we could ignore SIGPIPE, and then we would catch EPIPE (of course, we convert that into SIGPIPE in many places, but we do not have to do so). But since the SIGPIPE behavior is global, that carries the risk of us failing to check a write against some other descriptor. It's probably not worth it. Teaching the tests to handle both cases seems like a reasonable workaround. Changing test_must_fail covers a lot of cases; I wondered if there are other tests that would not want to silently cover up a SIGPIPE death. But I could not really think of a plausible reason. So I think your patch is the best thing to do. -Peff -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html