Re: 9.6 TAP tests and extensions

Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On 13 September 2016 at 22:02, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> Without taking a position on the merits of this patch per se, I'd like
>> to say that I find the argument for back-patching into 9.6 and not
>> further than that to be pretty dubious. $(prove_check) has been there
>> since 9.4, and in the past we've often regretted it when we failed
>> to back-patch TAP infrastructure fixes all the way back to 9.4.

> No objection to backpatching, I just thought I'd be more intrusive to
> do that than just 9.6.

> Since 9.5 and older have more limited versions of PostgresNode which
> lack safe_psql, etc, I'm not sure it's very practical for extensions
> to bother running TAP tests on 9.4 and 9.5 anyway.

Certainly there are restrictions, but I'd imagine that every new release
will be adding features to the TAP test infrastructure for some time to
come. I think it's silly to claim that 9.6 is the first branch where
TAP testing is usable at all.

> Extension authors can just use:
> ifeq ($(MAJORVERSION),9.6)
> endif
> when defining their prove rules.

That will break as soon as 10 comes out. And numerical >= tests aren't
all that convenient in Make. It'd be much better if a test on whether
$(prove_check) is defined would be sufficient.

regards, tom lane