Re: RFC: adding pytest as a supported test framework

On Thu, 13 Jun 2024 at 17:19, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> I wonder if we should be checking out some of the other newer
> languages that were mentioned upthread.

If this is actually something that we want to seriously evaluate, I
think that's a significant effort. And I think the people that want a
language would need to step in to make that effort. So far Jacob[1],
Alexander[2] and me[3] seem to be doing that for Python, and Sutou has
done that for Ruby[4].

[1]: https://github.com/pgbouncer/pgbouncer/tree/master/test
[2]: https://github.com/jchampio/pg-pytest-suite
[3]: https://github.com/postgrespro/testgres
[4]: https://github.com/pgroonga/pgroonga/blob/main/test/test-streaming-replication.rb

> It feels like going to
> Python here will lead to having two testing infrastructures with
> mas-o-menos the same capabilities, leaving us with a situation
> where people have to know both languages in order to make sense of
> our test suite. I find it hard to picture that as an improvement
> over the status quo.

You don't have to be fluent in writing Python to be able to read and
understand tests written in it. As someone familiar with Python I can
definitely read our test suite, and I expect everyone smart enough to
be fluent in Perl to be able to read and understand Python with fairly
little effort too.

I think having significantly more tests being written, and those tests
being written faster and more correctly, is definitely worth the
slight mental effort of learning to read two very similarly looking
scripting languages (they both pretty much looking like pseudo code).