Re: TAP tests - installcheck vs check

On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 10:57 PM, Andrew Dunstan
<andrew(dot)dunstan(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On 04/23/2017 10:33 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Andrew Dunstan <andrew(dot)dunstan(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
>>> AFAICT, unlike the pg_regress checks, which in the installcheck case run
>>> against a running instance of postgres, for TAP tests the only
>>> difference is that that for the check case a temp install is done,
>>> possibly with some extra contrib modules. Is that correct? If is is, why
>>> aren't we providing an installcheck target for tests like recover. In at
>>> least one case (buildfarmn jacana) installs are quite expensive (2 or 3
>>> minutes) and if they are pointless as seems to be the case here why
>>> can't we just avoid them?
>> A lot of those test cases involve setting non-default configuration
>> parameters and/or stopping/starting the postmaster. So I can't see how
>> we would run them against a pre-existing live cluster, which is the usual
>> meaning of "make installcheck".
>>
>> I think what you're imagining is skipping redundant builds of the
>> "tmp_install" tree by using an installation tree with a temporary $PGDATA
>> directory. That seems like a fine idea, but we need another word for it.
>
> That's actually the current meaning of installcheck w.r.t. TAP. See
> Makefile.global.in. It's what we run (mostly) in the buildfarm for the
> bin tests.
>
> I agree entirely that it's confusing as heck. +1 for inventing a new name.

Yeah. I would have expected installcheck to just skip any tests that
don't make sense against an already-installed cluster. I would not
expect it to run those tests against some cluster other than the
installed cluster. That seems super-weird.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
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