[darcs-users] darcs patch: tests/*: refactor remaining IFS calls to lib

Gwern Branwen gwern0 at gmail.com
Mon Dec 1 16:56:47 UTC 2008


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On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 10:47 AM, Eric Kow  wrote:
> Ah, I was just about to write you to report that tests are still passing
> after your first patch.
>
> But are you sure this is a good idea, below, to effectively make /every/
> test set IFS=''?
>
> The bash manpage says:
>
> IFS    The Internal Field Separator that is  used  for  word  splitting
>       after  expansion  and  to  split  lines into words with the read
>       builtin  command.   The  default  value  is  ''       line>''.
>
> I confess that I still don't fully understand the consquences of this.
> One thing I'm worried about is breaking other non-IFS-y tests.  Another
> deeper worry is that we start (unknowingly) writing tests that depend
> on this behaviour.
>
> What do you think?

(Sorry about the previous email, I pressed the wrong buttons.)

Points:
1) Only lib callers are affected.
2) Should any of our scripts be calling read?
3) Each test should be running in its own shell or subshell for
maximum separation.
4) We can conditionally set IFS on Windows, ie.
if echo $OS | grep -i windows; then
  IFS=''
fi

- --
gwern
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