Re: Postgres alpha testing docs and general test packs

2009/11/1 Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net>:
> On ons, 2009-10-28 at 14:13 +0000, Thom Brown wrote:
>> I'm not really asking for the answer to those questions.  I'm pointing
>> out that it isn't clear (at least to me) how to determine what exactly
>> has been fixed in order to test it.  This doesn't apply to everything
>> listed as some of it is quite clear, like "pg_dump/pg_restore --clean
>> now drops large objects."
>
> You can be reasonably assured that the particular fixes have been tested
> and work, unless they are explicitly documented otherwise.  We don't
> necessarily need more eyeballs to, say, check that the binary input
> function of the xml type has *really* been fixed.

Fair enough. :) It's my experience in testing that makes me want to
test particular things to death.

> One point of the alpha releases is to test whether nothing else has been
> broken by the various fixes, new features, and refactorings.  And you
> can check that by running your application on top of the new database
> server.  It helps if you have a test suite for your application.  For
> example, if the fix of the binary input function of the xml type breaks
> your application because it had relied on some undocumented corner case,
> now would be good time to find that out.

Yeah, I should realise this is just an alpha release really.
Unfortunately I'd imagine that most places using PostgreSQL in
production won't be participating in alpha testing at all as there's
no call for it.

No doubt I can find what I'm looking for, even if it's looking through
the commit log. But I guess that's your point, I probably don't need
to do that.

At the moment Gentoo doesn't even want for format my primary partition
(some DRDY error), so I still haven't had the chance to give this a
go. :(

Thom