The intention of the test seems to be to build a long chain of
clones that locally borrow objects from their parents and see the
system give up dereferencing long chains. There were two problems:
(1) it did not test the right repository;
(2) it did not build a chain long enough to trigger the limitation.
I do not think it is a good test to make sure the limitation the
current implementation happens to have still exists, but that is
a topic at a totally different level.