Re: Direction for test frameworks: Perl TAP vs. Python/pytest

On Tue, Jun 16, 2026 at 11:16 AM Aleksander Alekseev
<aleksander(at)tigerdata(dot)com> wrote:
>
> > I'm not super attracted to the idea of back-patching a whole new test
> > framework into stable branches. But the alternatives are not pretty
> > either --- eg, who will want to write a python test and then translate
> > it to perl for the back branches?
>
> That's a fair concern. It seems to me that back-patching TAP tests
> doesn't happen too often. Also modern LLM agents should be quite good
> at it.

I've written a few backpatches, and actually writing a TAP test for
those is pretty common because you are fixing a bug and often one that
is hard to reproduce (or it would get caught earlier) and only
testable in TAP. However, I always had to write variants for each
branch that were different enough for different reasons that I
wouldn't have minded writing it in a different framework -- especially
when the initial draft version could be written by an LLM.

I think doing this is far preferable to backporting the test framework
-- which will likely be a quite active development area and thus
itself require lots of backpatches. That sounds like a good way to
make everyone hate the new test framework.

Now, granted, I have only averaged a couple backpatches a year, so
those more prolific authors may feel different.

- Melanie