Re: TAP test breakage on MacOS X

Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
> On 10/07/2014 01:57 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Peter had a patch to eliminate the overhead of multiple subinstalls;
>> not sure where that stands, but presumably it would address your issue.

> Is there any progress on this. I'm reluctant to add this to the
> buildfarm client until it's solved. These tests currently take a heck of
> a lot longer than any other test suite.

While I'd like to see that patch committed to cut the runtime of "make
check" in contrib, it's hardly the only stumbling block between us and
enabling TAP tests in the buildfarm.

The pathname length problem I noted in
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/16477.1413831571@sss.pgh.pa.us
seems like a show-stopper as well, since undoubtedly a number of
buildfarm critters are using buildroots with paths long enough to
trigger it.

The larger issue though is that even with both the above things fixed,
the TAP tests would still be an expensive no-op on the majority of
buildfarm members. AFAICT, I do not own a single machine on which the
current TAP tests will consent to run, and in most cases that's after
going out of my way to fetch CPAN modules that aren't in the vendor Perl
installs. Peter's mostly been fixing the portability issues by disabling
tests, which I guess is better than no fix at all, but it leaves darn
little useful functionality.

I think we need a serious discussion about choosing a baseline Perl
version on which we need the TAP tests to work, and then some effort
to make the tests actually work (not just skip tests) on all versions
beyond that.

regards, tom lane