On Tue, Apr 27 2021, Luke Shumaker wrote: > It's unclear what the purpose of t7900-subtree.sh's > `subtree_test_create_repo` helper function is. It wraps test-lib.sh's, > `test_create_repo` but follows that up by setting log.date=relative. Why > does it set log.date=relative? > > My first guess was that at one point the tests required that, but no > longer do, and that the function is now vestigial. I even wrote a patch > to get rid of it and was moments away from `git send-email`ing it. > > However, by chance when looking for something else in the history, I > discovered the true reason, from e7aac44ed2 (contrib/subtree: ignore > log.date configuration, 2015-07-21). It's testing that setting > log.date=relative doesn't break `git subtree`, as at one point in the past > that did break `git subtree`. This commit message is too much about describing the journey IMO. We could just get straight to the point, e.g. something like: Add a comment about why the git-subtree.sh tests set log.relative. It's to test that we don't have a regression of the bug fixed in e7aac44ed2 [...]. FWIW I think just having an isolated test for this would be better, but since you're just refactoring existing code I think this is fine. I.e. we'd use "git init" in the rest, and just have a test that stresses this specifically. Or is the entry into git-subtree.sh so varied that we need to "fuzz" all the tests like this to fully test it? I haven't checked.