jtreg shell tests

[Jonathan Gibbons]

Martin,

Thank you for your added insight.

The additional reasons why you might want to run tests outside of jtreg
are particularly interesting.

-- Jon

On 1/27/19 8:07 AM, Martin Buchholz wrote:
> I agree with Jonathan.
>
> For tests like my ancient MineField.sh it's hard for java code to beat
> the compactness of bash code for testing command execution, so I agree
> that shell execution  should remain an option, while continuing to
> make it easier to write both shell and java tests that spawn
> subprocesses.
>
> Some Google perspective: we also have bash libraries.  They might get
> source'd multiple times, so should be idempotent (we actually use C
> style include guards in bash libraries).
>
> I used to believe that standalone execution of tests was a nice
> feature, but agree it's less of a concern now.  It's very nice for
> jtreg to provide a -show:rerun feature.  One reason for running the
> test outside of the test harness is to insert a wrapper around the
> test process, e.g. point LD_LIBRARY_PATH at a debugging malloc or run
> under "strace -c" to measure syscalls.  So we have a --run_under=...
> flag that takes care of many use cases for standalone execution.