Re: PG_TEST_EXTRA and meson

On Fri, Aug 9, 2024 at 2:26 AM Ashutosh Bapat
<ashutosh(dot)bapat(dot)oss(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Here are my observations with the patch applied
> 1. If I run configure without setting PG_TEST_EXTRA, it won't run the
> tests that require PG_TEST_EXTRA to be set. This is expected.
> 2. But it wont' run tests even if PG_TEST_EXTRA is set while running
> make check.- that's unexpected

(see below)

> 3. If I run configure with PG_TEST_EXTRA set and run 'make check' in
> the test directory, it runs those tests. That's expected from the
> final patch but that doesn't seem to be what you described above.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean? src/test should work fine,
anything lower than that (say src/test/ssl) does not.

> 3. After 3, if I run `PG_TEST_EXTRA="something" make check`, it still
> runs those tests. So it looks like PG_TEST_EXTRA doesn't get
> overridden. If PG_TEST_EXTRA is set to something other than what was
> configured, it doesn't take effect when running the corresponding
> tests. E.g. PG_TEST_EXTRA is set to xid_wraparound at configure time,
> but `PG_TEST_EXTRA=wal_consistency_check make check ` is run, the
> tests won't use wal_consistency_check=all. - that's not expected.

I think you're running into the GNU Make override order [1]. For
instance when I want to override PG_TEST_EXTRA, I write

make check PG_TEST_EXTRA=whatever

If you want the environment variable to work by default instead, you can do

PG_TEST_EXTRA=whatever make check -e

If you don't want devs to have to worry about the difference, I think
we can change the assignment operator to `?=` in Makefile.global.in.

Thanks,
--Jacob

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Environment.html