Re: Bugs in copyfuncs/equalfuncs support for JSON node types

Justin Pryzby <pryzby(at)telsasoft(dot)com> writes:
> Do the missing fields indicate a deficiency in test coverage ?
> _copyJsonTablePlan.pathname and _equalJsonTable.plan.

Yeah, I'd say so, but I think constructing a test case to prove
it's broken might be more trouble than it's worth --- particularly
seeing that we're about to automate this stuff. Because of that,
I wouldn't even be really concerned about these bugs in HEAD; but
this needs to be back-patched into v15.

The existing COPY_PARSE_PLAN_TREES logic purports to test this
area, but it fails to notice these bugs for a few reasons:

* JsonTable.lateral: COPY_PARSE_PLAN_TREES itself failed to detect
this problem because of matching omissions in _copyJsonTable and
_equalJsonTable. But the lack of any follow-on failure implies
that we don't have any test cases where the lateral flag is significant.
Maybe that means the field is useless? This one would be worth a closer
look, perhaps.

* JsonTableColumn.format: this scalar-instead-of-deep-copy bug
would only be detectable if you were able to clobber the original
parse tree after copying. I have no ideas about an easy way to
do that. It'd surely bite somebody in the field someday, but
making a reproducible test is way harder.

* JsonTable.plan: to detect the missed comparison, you'd have to
build a test case where comparing two such trees actually made
a visible difference; which would require a fair amount of thought
I fear. IIUC this node type will only appear down inside jointrees,
which we don't usually do comparisons on.

regards, tom lane