Re: PSA: we lack TAP test coverage on NetBSD and OpenBSD

Fabien COELHO <coelho@cri.ensmp.fr>

From: Fabien COELHO <coelho@cri.ensmp.fr>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: PostgreSQL Developers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2019-01-18T22:01:07Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
>> Maybe on OpenBSD pg should switch srandom to srandom_deterministic?
>
> Dunno.  I'm fairly annoyed by their idea that they're smarter than POSIX.
> However, for most of our uses of srandom, this behavior isn't awful;
> it's only pgbench that has an expectation that the platform random()
> can be made to behave deterministically.  And TBH I think that's just
> an expectation that's going to bite us.
>
> I'd suggest that maybe we should get rid of the use of both random()
> and srandom() in pgbench, and go over to letting set_random_seed()
> fill the pg_erand48 state directly.  In the integer-seed case you
> could use something equivalent to pg_srand48.  (In the other cases
> probably you could do better, certainly the strong-random case could
> just fill all 6 bytes directly.)  That would get us to a place where
> the behavior of --random-seed=N is not only deterministic but
> platform-independent, which seems like an improvement.

That's a point. Althought I'm not found of round48, indeed having 
something platform independent for testing makes definite sense.

I'll look into it.

-- 
Fabien.


Commits

  1. Fix portability problem in pgbench.

  2. Avoid assuming that we know the spelling of getopt_long's error messages.