Re: dropping table in testcase alter_table.sql

On tis, 2011-07-12 at 08:51 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
> > It has occurred to me a few times that it could be useful to clarify the
> > approach here. If we could somehow have a separable cleanup step for
> > every test, and eliminate interdependencies between tests, we could more
> > easily support a number of uses cases such as creating a completely
> > populated regression test database for playing, or running tests in
> > random order or in differently parallelized scenarios.
>
> The limiting case of this is that each regression test script would be
> expected to start in an empty database and leave the DB empty on exit.
> I think that would make the tests less useful, not more, for several
> reasons:
>
> 1. They'd be slower, since every test would have to start by creating
> and populating some tables.
>
> 2. The final state of the regression database would no longer be useful
> as an environment for running ad-hoc manual tests.
>
> 3. The final state of the regression database would no longer be useful
> as a test case for pg_dump and pg_upgrade.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I wanted take out the
cleanup parts out of all test cases and make it a choice whether to run
them. Right now we have a lot of test cases that clean up after
themselves, which is useful in some cases (testing the cleaning, for one
thing), but not useful for 2. and 3.