Re: RFC: adding pytest as a supported test framework

On 2024-06-11 Tu 19:48, Noah Misch wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 06:49:11PM -0700, Andres Freund wrote:
>> On 2024-06-10 16:46:56 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>>> On 2024-06-10 Mo 16:04, Andres Freund wrote:
>>>> Just for context for the rest the email: I think we desperately need to move
>>>> off perl for tests. The infrastructure around our testing is basically
>>>> unmaintained and just about nobody that started doing dev stuff in the last 10
>>>> years learned perl.
>>> As for what up and coming developers learn, they mostly don't learn C
>>> either, and that's far more critical to what we do.
>> C is a a lot more useful to to them than perl. And it's actually far more
>> widely known these days than perl.
> If we're going to test in a non-Perl language, I'd pick C over Python.  There
> would be several other unlikely-community-choice languages I'd pick over
> Python (C#, Java, C++).  We'd need a library like today's Perl
> PostgreSQL::Test to make C-language tests nice, but the same would apply to
> any new language.


Indeed. We've invested quite a lot of effort on that infrastructure. I 
guess people can learn from what we've done so a second language might 
be easier to support.

(Java would be my pick from your unlikely set, but I can see the 
attraction of Python.)


>
> I also want the initial scope to be the new language coexisting with the
> existing Perl tests.  If a bulk translation ever happens, it should happen
> long after the debut of the new framework.  That said, I don't much trust a
> human-written bulk language translation to go through without some tests
> accidentally ceasing to test what they test in Perl today.


+1


cheers


andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com