On Thu, Jun 03 2021, Jeff King wrote: > On Thu, Jun 03, 2021 at 03:23:02PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote: > >> Jeff King wrote: >> > Preemptively finding portability problems may save work in the long >> > term. And people may even be using Git on AIX and just ignoring test >> > failures, or they have GNU coreutils installed anyway, etc. But it would >> > also save work if we can ignore platforms that nobody uses. >> >> I agree, but the Git project is overly preoccupied (IMO) with >> hypothetical issues some hypothetical users might have in some >> hypothetical situations, and that is used as a rationale to block changes >> that would improve the experience of the vast majority of users. >> >> This is not a hypothetical issue, and yet you are suggesting to >> discount it? >> >> I don't disagree, but this is not consistent. > > I don't think they're the same issue at all. One is: we have millions of > users, and this change may affect some of them negatively, so we may > want to err on the side of caution. The other is: this has been > accidentally broken for four years and nobody complained, so perhaps > nobody is actually using it. Aside from AIX I think you're assuming less of a cowboy attitude among packagers of these platforms than is the reality in the wild :) I mean I don't blame them, git's just one thing they're packaging, and e.g. on the BSD's or whatever this is just the Nth Linux-toolchain-specific smelling test failure or issue they have that day. I have some incomplete work somewhere to slurp up all the package sources I could find in the wild (SRPM's, Debian recipies etc.) and their patches, the aim was to submit it into contrib/ so we could see what monkeypatches to git.git existed in the wild. Last time I looked at those (and this is from memory, and it was a while ago) many of those patches / build recipies were simply blindly skipping or otherwise working around test failures. So we can't assume that failures in the wild are reported to us, and I think many packagers are not running any of our tests at all. If it compiles and seems to work they're probably just shipping it.
