Re: Postgres alpha testing docs and general test packs

On ons, 2009-10-28 at 14:13 +0000, Thom Brown wrote:
> > http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/release-8-5.html
>
> Thanks Adrian. I just wasn't looking hard enough obviously :) That
> list still doesn't appear to be explicit enough though as we have
> "Multiple improvements in contrib/hstore, including raising limits on
> keys and values". What exactly is meant by limit, what was this limit
> before and what has it been raised to?
>
> Similarly: "Fix encoding handling in binary input function of xml
> type." What was the problem before?
>
> And: "Allow the collection of statistics on sequences". How would
> your average end-user see whether these statistics are being colelcted
> on sequences? And are these statistics actually used anywhere yet?

I agree some of the release note items could be written in a more useful
way. But ultimately, we can't elaborate on every code fix in detail.
Concentrate on the new features and try them out. They should be
documented. If not, or you can't find the documentation, please report
that.

> I'm not really asking for the answer to those questions. I'm pointing
> out that it isn't clear (at least to me) how to determine what exactly
> has been fixed in order to test it. This doesn't apply to everything
> listed as some of it is quite clear, like "pg_dump/pg_restore --clean
> now drops large objects."

You can be reasonably assured that the particular fixes have been tested
and work, unless they are explicitly documented otherwise. We don't
necessarily need more eyeballs to, say, check that the binary input
function of the xml type has *really* been fixed.

One point of the alpha releases is to test whether nothing else has been
broken by the various fixes, new features, and refactorings. And you
can check that by running your application on top of the new database
server. It helps if you have a test suite for your application. For
example, if the fix of the binary input function of the xml type breaks
your application because it had relied on some undocumented corner case,
now would be good time to find that out.