Re: Updating IPC::Run in CI?

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>

From: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
To: Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>
Cc: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com>
Date: 2025-09-18T19:16:21Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Hi,

On 2025-09-18 11:48:15 -0700, Jacob Champion wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 11:18 AM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> > As you can see we currently don't install packages from outside netbsd's
> > package repository.  We could change that and install IPC::Run via cpan, but
> > imo it's obviously nicer - and more representative of real world setups - if
> > we just rely on OS/distro packages.
> 
> I guess there's a bit of a philosophical question there: for a
> test-only dependency in our CI, do we want it to be "representative of
> real-world setups", or do we want it to work as well as it can?

I don't think there's a hard and fast rule, but I do think that it's a
reasonably important goal to make sure that the OS/distro actually can build
packages - and as part of that test those packages - reasonably well. So
requiring wildly different things than what is available on $platform to run
the tests reliably is bad.

Greetings,

Andres Freund