Derrick Stolee <stolee@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > The test is comparing the same exact Git command just with > different configurations. Any change to what Git writes to > stderr should be consistent across these, unless there is > an explicit reason why it would behave differently across > these options (for example, saying "You are in a sparse > checkout" in 'git status'). > > There are no expectations that stderr is stable across > versions of Git. These tests don't add friction to developers > making new features or changing the error messages that appear > over stderr. It's just that these tests should catch any > unintended inconsistency across these modes. If it just happens that an auto-gc gets triggered, and millions of other similar reasons in the future, will break that expectation, without running two different vintages of Git. I agree with Jonathan that it fundamentally is flakey to expect two invocations of Git will behave exactly the same. Even repacking a repository starting from exactly the same state into a single pack may not produce byte-for-byte identical result due to thread scheduling.
