Re: RFC: adding pytest as a supported test framework

Wolfgang Walther <walther@technowledgy.de>

From: walther@technowledgy.de
To: Jelte Fennema-Nio <postgres@jeltef.nl>, Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com>
Cc: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>, Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2024-06-12T14:56:49Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Jelte Fennema-Nio:
> As scripting languages go, the ones that are still fairly heavily in
> use are Javascript, Python, Ruby, and PHP. I think all of those could
> probably work, but my personal order of preference would be Python,
> Ruby, Javascript, PHP.
> 
> Finally, I'm definitely biased towards using Python myself. But I
> think there's good reasons for that:
> 1. In the data space, that Postgres in, Python is very heavily used for analysis
> 2. Everyone coming out of university these days knows it to some extent
> 3. Multiple people in the community have been writing Postgres related
> tests in python and have enjoyed doing so (me[1], Jacob[2],
> Alexander[3])

PostgREST also uses pytest for integration tests - and that was a very 
good decision compared to the bash based tests we had before.

One more argument for Python compared to the other mentioned scripting 
languages: Python is already a development dependency via meson. None of 
the other 3 are. In a future where meson will be the only build system, 
we will have python "for free" already.

Best,

Wolfgang