Re: meson: Make test output much more useful on failure (both in CI and locally)

On 02.04.26 14:25, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> 
> On 2026-03-20 Fr 2:13 PM, Corey Huinker wrote:
>>
>>     Shortened it using your example run.
>>
>>
>> Glad I was able to help.
>>
>>     > I can't wait to use this.
>>
>>     Me too :) I've also added the Author/Reviewed-By/Discussion footers to
>>     the commits to make the committers job easier.
>>
>>
>> I've held off on doing that in my proposed commits so as not to be 
>> presumptuous, but I can see where having it available would be a 
>> convenience for the committer. This will be a good test of that.
>>
>> Applies clean to master, passes tests. Ship it.
> 
> 
> Committed with minor tidy up. The main change was to add a @CARP_NOT 
> setting in Utils.pm, so that croak() would look back past Cluster.pm to 
> the TAP script caller.

I would like to register a vote against this new behavior:

     pg_regress: Include diffs in TAP output

     When pg_regress fails it is often tedious to find the actual diffs,
     especially in CI where you must navigate a file browser.  Emit the 
first
     80 lines of the combined regression.diffs as TAP diagnostics so the
     failure reason is visible directly in the test output.

I find this annoying.

What happens, and this is admittedly my particular experience, is that 
the diff lines are wider than the terminal width, and so 80 lines in the 
file might end up being 200 lines on screen, and then the summary of the 
test failure disappears from the screen and the diff output is garbled 
and useless, and so the whole output is now less useful than before.

I could see this maybe being useful if the entire diff file is, say, 
less than 50 lines.  But I don't see how seeing a truncated diff by 
default can be useful.

The commit message makes reference to "especially on CI".  Maybe this 
new behavior should be triggered by being on CI, or the output not being 
a terminal, or something like that.