t: provide a perl() function which uses $PERL_PATH

Once upon a time, we assumed that calling a bare "perl" in the test scripts was OK, because we would find the perl from the user's PATH, and we were only asking that perl to do basic operations that work even on old versions of perl. Later, we found that some systems really prefer to use $PERL_PATH even for these basic cases, because the system perl misbehaves in some way (e.g., by handling line endings differently). We then switched "perl" invocations to "$PERL_PATH" to respect the user's choice. Having to use "$PERL_PATH" is ugly and cumbersome, though. Instead, let's provide a perl() shell function that tests can use, which will transparently do the right thing. Unfortunately, test writers still have to use $PERL_PATH in certain situations, so we still need to keep the advice in the README. Note that this may fix test failures in t5004, t5503, t6002, t6003, t6300, t8001, and t8002, depending on your system's perl setup. All of these can be detected by running: ln -s /bin/false bin-wrappers/perl make test which fails before this patch, and passes after. Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

Jeff King committed Oct 28, 2013 at 21:22 UTC a0e0ec9f7dd2ad46459cf98b7465b007fb15258b
2 files changed +12 -4
t/README
+8 -4
@@ -340,7 +340,11 @@ Don't:
340 - use perl without spelling it as "$PERL_PATH". This is to help our
341 friends on Windows where the platform Perl often adds CR before
342 the end of line, and they bundle Git with a version of Perl that
343 - does not do so, whose path is specified with $PERL_PATH.
343 + does not do so, whose path is specified with $PERL_PATH. Note that we
344 + provide a "perl" function which uses $PERL_PATH under the hood, so
345 + you do not need to worry when simply running perl in the test scripts
346 + (but you do, for example, on a shebang line or in a sub script
347 + created via "write_script").
348
349 - use sh without spelling it as "$SHELL_PATH", when the script can
350 be misinterpreted by broken platform shell (e.g. Solaris).
@@ -387,7 +391,7 @@ of the test_* functions (see the "Test harness library" section
391 below), e.g.:
392
393 test_expect_success PERL 'I need Perl' '
390 - "$PERL_PATH" -e "hlagh() if unf_unf()"
394 + perl -e "hlagh() if unf_unf()"
395 '
396
397 The advantage of skipping tests like this is that platforms that don't
@@ -520,7 +524,7 @@ library for your script to use.
524
525 test_external \
526 'GitwebCache::*FileCache*' \
523 - "$PERL_PATH" "$TEST_DIRECTORY"/t9503/test_cache_interface.pl
527 + perl "$TEST_DIRECTORY"/t9503/test_cache_interface.pl
528
529 If the test is outputting its own TAP you should set the
530 test_external_has_tap variable somewhere before calling the first
@@ -536,7 +540,7 @@ library for your script to use.
540
541 test_external_without_stderr \
542 'Perl API' \
539 - "$PERL_PATH" "$TEST_DIRECTORY"/t9700/test.pl
543 + perl "$TEST_DIRECTORY"/t9700/test.pl
544
545 - test_expect_code <exit-code> <command>
546
t/test-lib-functions.sh
+4
@@ -710,3 +710,7 @@ test_ln_s_add () {
710 git update-index --add --cacheinfo 120000 $ln_s_obj "$2"
711 fi
712 }
713 +
714 +perl () {
715 + command "$PERL_PATH" "$@"
716 +}