On Mon, Nov 08 2021, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Taylor Blau <me@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> In my experience I *rarely* rely on test-helpers when debugging wedged >> repositories, and much more often end up either in gdb, or in an >> anonymized copy of the repository on a different server. I would imagine >> that others have similar experiences. >> >> So unless we had a much more compelling reason to have the test helpers >> more readily available, I do not think that the risk our users will >> begin to depend on these unstable tools is worth taking. > > OK. It sounds like a sensible argument against such a change. It's an argument against not flipping "make installing them be optional" flag on by default, but we could otherwise move some of t/helper to builtin/, which would help by encouraging us to write at least boilerplate docs for them. Git developers & similar parties could then set them to be installed for ad-hoc debugging. Whatever anyone things on that, just on Taylor's "begin to depend on"... I really don't buy the argument that there's no amount of warnings in our documentation that we can include which would give us future license to willy-nilly change certain things. If that is being argued then that seems to categorically exclude certain other things, e.g. including "scalar" in-tree at all, because if we can't trust users to read the warnings about it being "contrib-y"...
