Jeff King authored Jul 09, 2020 and Junio C Hamano committed Jul 10, 2020

The test for "no shallow lines after receiving ACK ready" is very
sensitive to the timestamps of the commits we create. It's looking for
the fetch negotiation to send a "ready", which in turn depends on the
order in which we traverse commits during the negotiation.

It works reliably now because the base commit "7" is created without
test_commit, and thus gets a commit time matching the current system
clock. Whereas the new commits created in this test do use test_commit,
and get the usual test_tick time from 2005. So the fetch into the
"clone" repository results in a commit graph like this (I omitted some
of the "unrelated" commits for clarity; they're all just a sequence of
test_ticks):

  $ git log --graph --format='%ct %s %d'
  * 1112912953 new  (origin/master, origin/HEAD)
  * 1594322236 7  (grafted, master)
  * 1112912893 unrelated15  (origin/unrelated15, unrelated15)
  [...]
  * 1112912053 unrelated1  (origin/unrelated1, unrelated1)
  * 1112911993 new-too  (HEAD -> newnew, tag: new-too)

The important things to see are:

  - "7" is way in the future compared to the other commits

  - "new-too" in the fetching repo is older than "new" (and its
    "unrelated" ancestors) in the shallow repo

If we change our "setup shallow clone" step to use test_tick, too (and
get rid of the dependency on the system clock), then the test will fail.
The resulting graph looks like this:

  $ git log --graph --format='%ct %s %d'
  * 1112913373 new  (origin/master, origin/HEAD)
  * 1112912353 7  (grafted, master)
  * 1112913313 unrelated15  (origin/unrelated15, unrelated15)
  [...]
  * 1112912473 unrelated1  (origin/unrelated1, unrelated1)
  * 1112912413 new-too  (HEAD -> newnew, tag: new-too)

Our "new-too" is still older than "new" and "unrelated", but now "7" is
older than all of them (because it advanced test_tick, which the other
tests built on top of). In the original, we advertised "7" as the first
"have" before anything else, but now "new-too" is more recent. You'd see
the same thing in the unlikely event that the system clock was set
before our test_tick default in 2005.

Let's make the timing requirements more explicit. The important thing is
that the client advertise all of its shared commits first, before
presenting its unique "new-too" commit. We can do that and get rid of
the system clock dependency at the same time by creating all of the
shared commits around time X (using test_tick), and then creating
"new-too" with some time long before X. The resulting graph looks like
this:

  $ git log --graph --format='%ct %s %d'
  * 1500001380 new  (origin/master, origin/HEAD)
  * 1500000420 7  (grafted, master)
  * 1500001320 unrelated15  (origin/unrelated15, unrelated15)
  [...]
  * 1500000480 unrelated1  (origin/unrelated1, unrelated1)
  * 1400000060 new-too  (HEAD -> newnew, tag: new-too)

That also lets us get rid of the hacky test_tick added by f0e802ca


(t5539: update a flaky test, 2014-07-14). That was clearly dancing
around the same problem, but only addressed the relationship between
commits created in the two subshells (which did use test_tick, but
overlapped because increments of test_tick in subshells are lost). Now
that we're using consistent and well-placed times for both lines of
history, we don't have to care about a one-tick difference between the
two sides.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>