Fwd: Multixid hindsight design

On 25 June 2015 at 00:52, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> I agree that we can do much better at testing than we traditionally
> have done, and I think pretty much everyone in the room for the
> developer unconference session on testing at PGCon was also in
> agreement with that. I really like the idea of taking purpose-built
> testing frameworks - like the one that Heikki created for the WAL
> format changes - and polishing them to the point where they can go
> into core. That's more work, of course, but very beneficial.

Something that'd really help with that, IMO, would be weakening the
requirement that everything be C or be core Perl. Instead require that
configure detect whether or not facilities for some tests are present,
and have them fail with a clean warning indicating they were skipped
for lack of pre-requisites at 'make' time.

I don't see that as significantly different to having some buildfarm
animals not bother to configure or test the PLs, SSL, etc. I
understand why adding to the mix required for the core server build
isn't acceptable, but hopefully separate test suites can be more
flexible. A free-for-all of languages and tools doesn't make sense,
but I'd like to see, say, python and the 'unittest' module added, and
to see acceptance of tests using psycopg2 to stream and decode WAL
from a slot.

Thoughts?

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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