ci(github): bring back the 'print test failures' step

From: Johannes Schindelin <[email protected]>

Git now shows better information in the GitHub workflow runs when a test case failed. However, when a test case was implemented incorrectly and therefore does not even run, nothing is shown.

Let's bring back the step that prints the full logs of the failed tests, and to improve the user experience, print out an informational message for readers so that they do not have to know/remember where to see the full logs.

---
ci(GitHub workflow): bring back the 'print test failures' step

When an incorrectly-implemented test let a CI build fail
[https://github.com/git/git/runs/6703333447?check_suite_focus=true#step:4:1750]
without any failing test cases, the output was not helpful for readers who wished to investigate the problem:

[...]
751 ⏵Run tests
1746 === Failed test: t3105-ls-tree-output ===
1747 The full logs are in the artifacts attached to this run. 1748 Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

While this is still an improvement from before (where no output was shown in the test step at all, apart from the very high-level prove output), we can do better than point users to downloading the artifacts (which is a bit cumbersome).

With this patch, the print test failures step is reintroduced. To make sure that readers know to look at it, we now print an explicit message
[https://github.com/dscho/git/runs/6790035528?check_suite_focus=true#step:4:1741]:

[...]
749 ⏵Run tests
1737 === Failed test: t3105-ls-tree-output ===
1738 The full logs are in the 'print test failures' step below. 1739 See also the 'failed-tests-*' artifacts attached to this run. 1740 Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

The "print test failures" step is still not expanded by default, but at least the output is now so nicely uncluttered that it is really easy to spot it: it is right below the above-quoted error message.

Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-1252%2Fdscho%2Fci-print-failures-again-v1
Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-1252/dscho/ci-print-failures-again-v1
Pull-Request: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/pull/1252

 .github/workflows/main.yml | 16 ++++++++++++++++
 ci/lib.sh                  |  3 ++-
 2 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

index 3fa88b78b6d..cd1f52692a5 100644
@@ -119,6 +119,10 @@ jobs:
     - name: test
       shell: bash
       run: . /etc/profile && ci/run-test-slice.sh ${{matrix.nr}} 10
+    - name: print test failures
+      if: failure() && env.FAILED_TEST_ARTIFACTS != ''
+      shell: bash
+      run: ci/print-test-failures.sh
     - name: Upload failed tests' directories
       if: failure() && env.FAILED_TEST_ARTIFACTS != ''
       uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2

@@ -200,6 +204,10 @@ jobs:
       env:
         NO_SVN_TESTS: 1
       run: . /etc/profile && ci/run-test-slice.sh ${{matrix.nr}} 10
+    - name: print test failures
+      if: failure() && env.FAILED_TEST_ARTIFACTS != ''
+      shell: bash
+      run: ci/print-test-failures.sh
     - name: Upload failed tests' directories
       if: failure() && env.FAILED_TEST_ARTIFACTS != ''
       uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2

@@ -253,6 +261,10 @@ jobs:
     - uses: actions/checkout@v2
     - run: ci/install-dependencies.sh
     - run: ci/run-build-and-tests.sh
+    - name: print test failures
+      if: failure() && env.FAILED_TEST_ARTIFACTS != ''
+      shell: bash
+      run: ci/print-test-failures.sh
     - name: Upload failed tests' directories
       if: failure() && env.FAILED_TEST_ARTIFACTS != ''
       uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2

@@ -282,6 +294,10 @@ jobs:
     - uses: actions/checkout@v1
     - run: ci/install-docker-dependencies.sh
     - run: ci/run-build-and-tests.sh
+    - name: print test failures
+      if: failure() && env.FAILED_TEST_ARTIFACTS != ''
+      shell: bash
+      run: ci/print-test-failures.sh
     - name: Upload failed tests' directories
       if: failure() && env.FAILED_TEST_ARTIFACTS != ''
       uses: actions/upload-artifact@v1

index 2f6d9d26e40..b142d254ec1 100755
@@ -177,7 +177,8 @@ then
 			test_name="${test_exit%.exit}"
 			test_name="${test_name##*/}"
 			printf "\\e[33m\\e[1m=== Failed test: ${test_name} ===\\e[m\\n"
-			echo "The full logs are in the artifacts attached to this run."
+			echo "The full logs are in the 'print test failures' step below."
+			echo "See also the 'failed-tests-*' artifacts attached to this run."
 			cat "t/test-results/$test_name.markup"
 
 			trash_dir="t/trash directory.$test_name"

base-commit: 3069f2a6f4c38e7e599067d2e4a8e31b4f53e2d3

gitgitgadget

"Johannes Schindelin via GitGitGadget" <[email protected]>

Makes quite a lot of sense. Not all test gotchas are caught by test-lint locally, and something like this would still be needed.

Will queue.

This commit message should be more on-point. "Git" isn't showing anything, and it's unclear that this is a regression fix for fc5a070f591 (Merge branch 'js/ci-github-workflow-markup', 2022-06-07).

The *report* came about because of an incorrectly implemented test (of mine).

But the real issue is that your recent change to the CI output is implemented in such a way as to hide entire classes of errors that we'd previously show.

The test being broken is besides the point, of course we'll have broken tests. When we do so we should be showing output relevant to the failure.

The selling point of your js/ci-github-workflow-markup topic was that we *could* accurately summarize our failures as to make browsing the raw logs unnecessary. Quoting your
https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email protected]/:

I know, and I do not expect any new contributor, not even most seasoned contributors to know, that I have to patiently collapse the "Run ci/run-build-and-tests.sh" job's log, and instead expand the "Run ci/print-test-failures.sh" job log (which did not fail and hence does not draw any attention to it).

I know, and again: I do not expect many others to know this, that I then have to click into the "Search logs" box (not the regular web browser's search via Ctrl+F!) and type in "not ok" to find the log of the failed test case (and this might still be a "known broken" one that is marked via test_expect_failure and once again needs to be ignored).

To be excessively clear: This is not a great experience!

As before we agree that it's not the ideal UX experience. But I don't see how this isn't worse, especially for the proverbial new contributor.

I.e. when js/ci-github-workflow-markup landed we'd gotten rid of the ci/print-test-failures.sh output entirely, because the topic argued that we *could* accurately summarize these failures, and that any remaining issues requiring that step were so obscure as to be left to the artifacts downloading step.

But per my report at
https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email protected]/
(which b.t.w, would be useful to link to in the commit message) this will fail in cases where we'll die early in test-lib.sh itself, e.g. due to a syntax error.

Now, I haven't fully dug into what those cases are, but a regression fix really should take the time to do so. E.g. if we fail in a prereq that the test needs (with exit and/or BUG) do we similarly fail, how about e.g. chainlint, or is it just if "eval" itself fails?

But getting back to the point, because of that we'll now be asking those using the CI output to view the default GitHub Markup'd failure, and in addition knowing enough about its implementation to know if/when they should be opening the "print test failures" step as well, in case it over-elided some output.

As an example, the output is now with this change, and a change on top to re-trigger the reported failure:

	https://github.com/avar/git/runs/6808880749?check_suite_focus=true#step:4:1757

I.e. per the report above we only show a cryptic "Error: Process completed with exit code 1.", but we do have a "print test failures" step now.

And here's the version with the "GitHub markup" changes reverted:

	https://github.com/avar/git/runs/6808882949?check_suite_focus=true#step:4:1719

Which to be fair isn't much better in itself, but the greater context is that *usually* this step would be sufficient to view a failure, but some of the time it isn't, and you need to know enough to know when that's the case. That's new.

Except we still have another bug in js/ci-github-workflow-markup where bug in it altered the raw logs themselves. To be fair in this case you can see the failure itself.

Here's what we used to do:

    https://github.com/avar/git/runs/6808882949?check_suite_focus=true#step:5:579

And what we do now:

    https://github.com/avar/git/runs/6808880749?check_suite_focus=true#step:5:445

I.e. the former prints "expecting success of 3105.36 'setup:
HEAD_short_* variables': " followed by the test source itself, and then the "set -x" output, whereas the new output only has the "set -x" output. Both of them get to:

    t3105-ls-tree-output.sh: 20: local: --abbrev: bad variable name

So it doesn't matter much in this particular case, but we'll have other cases where browsing the raw logs is really useful, and having the now-missing context of the test source is even more useful.

I don't think we should call these "full logs" while the bug above remains unsolved. Perhaps "more verbose logs emitted when running with --github-workflow-markup, omit the flag to get the full *.out logs"?

Yup, I think we are all on the same page on that. And we also all agree that CI output should help those developers who make mistakes by making it easy to see them. The recent change may have been too aggressive to hide stuff in the name of "newbie friendliness", which may or may not have been a mismatch between what it claimed to aim at and what it actually did, but let's not grumble too much about it and move on in a more constructive way.

These fix-ups are to correct such earlier mistakes.

Yup.

If it is so important to support all the other shells in the GitHub workflows environment, we can discuss fix-up patches on top or replacement patches, but does that really matter? If this were main Makefile or ci/*.sh that are supposed to be usable by places other than GitHub Actions environment we use for the CI there, of course it would be worth to try being extra portable, but it may be even beneficial to "fix" .github/workflows/* stuff, so that we won't have to be affected by mistaken use of non-portable shell construct written there, perhaps?

It just looks like a mistake. The Windows sections need an explicit "bash" shell, but nothing else does, and the Windows sections had explicit names for somes stuff, but the other ones did not.

So I think thas was just a case of copy/pasting the first section(s) rather than bringing back the pre-image. I think just bringing back the old behavior makes sense for a regression fix in a re-roll.

Aside from that I think it's very useful to not rely on bash, for future directions of being able to use this tooling more portably, c.f. what I did in my series where you can run "like CI" locally, which I'd like to do on Solaris, AIX & whatever else without it being a portability hassle.

It turns out this is also a regression for our CI, if linux-musl fails it'll emit:

OCI runtime exec failed: exec failed: container_linux.go:380:
starting container process caused: exec: "bash": executable file not found in $PATH: unknown