Re: September 2015 Commitfest

On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 12:08:58PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Nathan Wagner <nw+pg(at)hydaspes(dot)if(dot)org> writes:
> > Second, it would be convenient if there were a make target that would
> > set up a test environment. Effectively do what the 'make check' does,
> > but don't run the tests and leave the database up. It should probably
> > drop you into a shell that has the paths set up as well. Another
> > target should be available to shut it down.
>
> As far as that goes, I don't think it's really the makefiles' place to
> establish a manual-testing convention. What I do, and what I think
> most other longtimers do, is create test installations in nondefault
> places.

[snip description on how to set this up ]

> You could imagine putting something into the standard makefiles
> that did some subset of this, but I think it would be too rigid
> to be useful.

I think it would be very useful to just be able to tell the system "fire
this up for me so I can test it". I don't think it needs to handle
every possible testing scenario, just making it easier to leave up the
test postmaster from make check would be very useful, at least to me.

> As an example, what if you wanted to compare the behaviors of both
> unmodified HEAD and your patched code? It's not very hard to set up
> two temporary installations along the lines of the recipe I've just
> given, but I can't see the makefiles handling that.

They could pick up make or environment variables. We already do that
for psql. Something like

PGPORT=5495 PGPATH=~/pg95 make startit

or some such. I'm not actually proposing this, I'm just noting how the
makefiles could handle it fairly easily. All I'd really like is a way
to leave the database used for 'make check' running so I can do any
additional poking around by hand that I might want to do more easily.

--
nw