On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 10:38:03AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > >> This is way off tangent, but I am somewhat sympathetic to Felipe's > >> "compare actual with expect", with reservations. > > > > This isn't an argument either way, but note that JUnit (and NUnit and > > PHPUnit) all have assertEquals methods that take the arguments in the > > order "expect, actual". I've always assumed that Git's test framework > > was imitating that,... > > No. See 82ebb0b6 (add test_cmp function for test scripts, > 2008-03-12). The "test_cmp" was a replacement for "diff -u", and > the same order we fed "diff -u", i.e. expect then actual, was > carried over.
I don't think it was intentional at the time. But over the intervening 5 years, I have noticed that I certainly think of "test_cmp A B" as "differences from A to B", and the order makes sense. IOW, the "test_cmp is diff" abstraction is leaky, and that is fine (if it were not leaky, then order would not matter at all, but it clearly does). But let's take a step back. This seems like an endian-ness issue to me. I.e., some people prefer one order for test assertions, and other people prefer the other. Is anyone actually right, or is this simply a matter of preference? And if it is simply a matter of preference, then why bother going through the pain of changing the current project standard? Though I prefer the current, I can certainly live and adapt to a changed standard, and I do not mind doing so if there is a good reason. But I've yet to see any argument beyond "it is not what I like". Which to me argues for the status quo as the path of least resistance. -Peff -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
