Re: [PATCH] remote-curl: add testing for intelligent retry for HTTP

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Sean McAllister <smcallis@google.com> writes:

>> Sean McAllister <smcallis@google.com> writes:
>>
>> > +# generate a random 12 digit string
>> > +gen_nonce() {
>> > +    test_copy_bytes 12 < /dev/urandom | tr -dc A-Za-z0-9
>> > +}
>>
>> What is the randomness requirement of this application?  IOW, what
>> breaks if we just change this to "echo 0123456789ab"?
>>
>> Or "date | git hash-object --stdin" for that matter?
>>
>> We'd want to make our tests more predictiable, not less.
>
> The randomness requirement is just that I need nonces to be unique
> during a single run of the HTTP server
> as they uniquefy the files I put on disk to make the HTTP hack-ily
> stateful.  I'd be fine with your date/hash-object
> solution, but I don't know that it will help make the tests more predictable.

If so, would something like this be

    global_counter_for_nonce=0
    gen_nonce () {
	global_counter_for_nonce=$(( global_counter_for_nonce + 1 )) &&
	echo "$global_counter_for_nonce"
    }

more appropriate?  It is utterly predictable and yields the same
answer only once during a single run.