Re: A note about debugging TAP failures

Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> On 2017-04-22 13:51:30 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> I think we need to fix TestLib and/or PostgresNode so that there's a way
>> to make TAP tests not auto-clean their data directories at end of run,
>> without having to resort to editing the script like this.

> I think leaving the directory around in case of failures would be a
> pretty bare minimum. It's sometimes also useful to keep the remains if
> everything was apparently successfull, but it's far less important imo.

In the particular case I was interested in here, the test script thought
everything was successful :-(. I'm working on fixing that little problem,
but I do not believe that the TAP scripts are so bulletproof that there
will never be a need to override their judgment.

> To me it sounds like we shouldn't use a randomly generated temporary
> name, but rather a static mapping based on the test's path or such, to
> create the relevant temp directory. Before a start a test could then
> clean that up, that way the amount of remaining cruft would be bound by
> the number of tests.

Yeah, that's a reasonable design. There doesn't seem to be a good reason
to randomize the test directory names.

regards, tom lane