Re: Regression testing for psql

Excerpts from Stephen Frost's message of mié may 26 15:19:59 -0400 2010:
> * Robert Haas (robertmhaas@gmail.com) wrote:
> > Then, too, there's the fact that many of these tests fail on my
> > machine because my username is not sfrost, 
> 
> I've updated the patch to address this, it's again at:
> http://snowman.net/~sfrost/psql-regress-help.patch

Isn't this kind of test a pain to maintain?  If somebody add a new SQL
command, it will affect the entire \h output and she'll have to either
apply the changes without checking them, or manually check the complete
list.  I have only to add a new function to make the test fail ...

Also, having to exclude tests that mention the database owner means that
you're only testing a fraction of the commands, so any possible problem
has a large chance of going undetected.  I mean, if we're going to test
this kind of thing, shouldn't we be using something that allows us to
ignore the db owner name?  A simple wildcard in place of the owner name
would suffice ... or do we need a regex for some other reason?

The \h output normally depends on terminal width.  Have you handled that
somehow?

(And if we want something like this, I think we should not have a single
huge file for the complete test, but a set of smaller files.  I'd even
put the bunch in src/bin/psql/regress rather than the main regress dir.)

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Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>
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