Re: pgsql: pg_regress: Don't use absolute paths for the diff

On 2019-02-22 15:18:51 -0800, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 10:01 AM Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> wrote:
> > pg_regress: Don't use absolute paths for the diff
> >
> > Don't expand inputfile and outputfile to absolute paths globally, just
> > where needed.  In particular, pass them as is to the file name
> > arguments of the diff command, so that we don't see the full absolute
> > path in the diff header, which makes the diff unnecessarily verbose
> > and harder to read.
> 
> This broke some of my tooling for quickly reconciling expected and
> actual test outputs from my text editor.
> 
> I don't think that this was a great idea.

Same. The output in my local vpath build is now:

diff -du10 /home/andres/src/postgresql/src/test/regress/expected/strings.out ./results/strings.out
--- /home/andres/src/postgresql/src/test/regress/expected/strings.out   2019-02-08 23:47:42.975815837 -0800
+++ ./results/strings.out       2019-02-22 15:23:41.857719662 -0800

that's useless, because I can't trivially copy the result file into the
expected file anymore. I have to figure out where in the tree it
is. Which isn't exactly predictable, between the different tests we
have as they locate their test results in different places.

This is a bad idea.

Greetings,

Andres Freund