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by locknitpicker 18 days ago
> That sounds like it would break bisect

Nonsense. First off, you can pick the starting commit, and nothing forces you to pick the test one. Second, bisect is designed to tracks changes from good state to bad state based on your personal criteria of what good and bad is. This means that you are free to put up tests that make sense to you (i.e., all tests except the one that was added as a red test) and even not run a test at all.
2 comments
assbuttbuttass 17 days ago
Suppose we have a failing test. For many commits, gp carefully separated their change that would break our test, from the change that would fix the test. At some point, someone forgot to run the tests, and introduced a commit that broke the test without adding a second commit to fix it. Now it's treated as a "pre-existing failure," and many more commits are added on top.

How would you identify the commit that broke the test?

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locknitpicker 17 days ago
> How would you identify the commit that broke the test?

You're asking how to use bisect.

You start with a range of commits you picked. All that bisect does is help you search for a commit within that range that introduces a regression. The responsibility to specify which commits you cover is yours, not the tool.

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assbuttbuttass 17 days ago
And then bisect fails because it finds one of the many commits that broke the test before the actual regression
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locknitpicker 17 days ago
> And then bisect fails because it finds one of the many commits that broke the test before the actual regression

And that's ok. You skip the commit and move on with your life.

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account42 17 days ago
And you can also use bisect by first figuring out the broken commit some other way and then marking everything as good if its before that one or bad if its after - but that's not a very productive use of bisect and if its the only available one I think its fair to call it broken.
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locknitpicker 17 days ago
> And you can also use bisect by first figuring out the broken commit some other way (...)

Bisect exists to be a tool you can use to fix the problems you are facing.

It you are faced by problems you create for yourself and you are unwilling to work around the problems you are creating then there is no tool on earth that can help you.

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