Re: Test to dump and restore objects left behind by regression

On 2025-Mar-28, Ashutosh Bapat wrote:

> However, it's a very painful process to come up with the schedule and
> more painful and error prone to maintain it. It could take many days
> to come up with the right schedule which can become inaccurate the
> moment next SQL file is added OR an existing file is modified to
> add/drop "interesting" objects.

Hmm, I didn't mean that we'd maintain a separate schedule. I meant that
we'd take the existing schedule, then apply some Perl magic to it that
grep-outs the tests that we know to contribute nothing, and generate a
new schedule file dynamically. We don't need to maintain a separate
schedule file.

You're right that if an existing uninteresting test is modified to
create interesting objects, we'd lose coverage of those objects. That
seems a much smaller problem to me. So it's just a matter of doing some
Perl map/grep to generate a new schedule file using the attached
exclusion file.

(For what it's worth, what I did to try to determine which tests to
include, rather than scan each file manually, is to run pg_regress with
"test_setup thetest tablespace", then dump the regression database, and
see if anything is there that's not in the dump when I just with just
"test_setup tablespace". I didn't carry the experiment to completion
though.)

For the future, we could annotate each test as you said, either by
adding a marker on the test file itself, or by adding something next to
its name in the schedule file, so the schedule file could look like:

test: plancache(dump_ignore) limit(stream_ignore) plpgsql copy2
temp(stream_ignore,dump_ignore) domain rangefuncs(stream_ignore)
prepare conversion truncate alter_table
sequence polymorphism rowtypes returning largeobject with xml

... and so on.

--
Álvaro Herrera PostgreSQL Developer — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/