Re: TAP test breakage on MacOS X

On 10/26/2014 12:29 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> 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.

+1 for fixing that, although it seems like a problem in what's being
tested rather than in the test suite.

>
> 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.
>
>

As far as the buildfarm goes, we could make it a cheap noop by checking
for the presence of the required modules (AFAIK that's Test::More,
IPC::CMD and IPC::Run).

I agree that just having it not run tests on most platforms is hardly a
solution.

cheers

andrew