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authorLibravatar Jeff King <peff@peff.net>2020-07-09 16:42:04 -0400
committerLibravatar Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>2020-07-14 14:28:11 -0700
commitf2e3937d94c0859c8616861b1d6c87e4efe0790d (patch)
tree615943781a57026f52fa07790eba8005f825735d /Documentation/RelNotes/2.13.5.txt
parentt9100: explicitly unset GIT_COMMITTER_DATE (diff)
downloadtgif-f2e3937d94c0859c8616861b1d6c87e4efe0790d.tar.xz
test-lib: set deterministic default author/committer date
We always set the name and email for committer and author idents to make the test suite more deterministic, but not timestamps. Many scripts use test_tick to get consistent and sensibly incrementing timestamps as they create commits. But other scripts don't particularly care about the timestamp, and are happy to use whatever the current system time is. This non-determinism can be annoying: - when debugging a test, comparing results between two runs can be difficult, because the commit ids change - this can sometimes cause tests to be racy. E.g., traversal order depends on timestamp order. Even in a well-ordered set of commands, because our timestamp granularity is one second, two commits might sometimes have the same timestamp and sometimes differ. Let's set a default timestamp for all scripts to use. Any that use test_tick already will be unaffected (because their first test_tick call will overwrite our default), but it will make things a bit more deterministic for those that don't. We should be able to choose any time we want here. I picked this one because: - it differs from the initial test_tick default, which may make it easier to distinguish when debugging tests. I picked "April 1st 13:14:15" in the hope that it might stand out. - it's slightly before the test_tick default. Some tests create some commits before the first call to test_tick, so using an older timestamps for those makes sense chronologically. Note that this isn't how things currently work (where system times are usually more recent than test_tick), but that also allows us to flush out a few hidden timestamp dependencies (like the one recently fixed in t5539). - we could likewise pick any timezone we want. Choosing +0000 would have required fixing up fewer tests, but we're more likely to turn up interesting cases by not matching $TZ exactly. And since test_tick already checks "-0700", let's try something in the "+" zone range for variety. It's possible that the non-deterministic times could help flush out bugs (e.g., if something broke when the clock flipped over to 2021, our test suite would let us know). But historically that hasn't been the case; all time-dependent outcomes we've seen turned out to be accidentally flaky tests (which we fixed by using test_tick). If we do want to cover handling the current time, we should dedicate one script to doing so, and have it unset GIT_COMMITTER_DATE explicitly. Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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