view tests/README @ 31478:9335dc6b2a9c

pager: avoid shell=True on subprocess.Popen for better errors (issue5491)

man(1) behaves as poorly as Mercurial without this change. This cribs
from git's run-command[0], which has a list of characters that imply a
string that needs to be run using 'sh -c'. If none of those characters
are present in the command string, we can use shell=False mode on
subprocess and get significantly better error messages (see the test)
when the pager process is invalid. With a complicated pager command
(that contains one of the unsafe characters), we behave as we do today
(which is no worse than git manages.)

I briefly tried tapdancing in a thread to catch early pager exits, but
it's just too perilous: you get races between fd duping operations and
a bad pager exiting, and it's too hard to differentiate between a
slow-bad-pager result and a fast-human-quit-pager-early result.

I've observed some weird variation in exit code handling in the "bad
experience" case in test-pager.t: on my Mac hg predictably exits
nonzero, but on Linux hg always exits zero in that case. For now,
we'll work around it with || true. :(

0: https://github.com/git/git/blob/cddbda4bc87b9d2c985b6749b1cf026b15e2d3e7/run-command.c#L201

To run the tests, do:

cd tests/
python run-tests.py

See https://mercurial-scm.org/wiki/WritingTests for
more information on writing tests.