Re: TAP test breakage on MacOS X

Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnakangas@vmware.com> writes:
> On 10/27/2014 05:41 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
>> Beyond all that, I have serious doubts about whether, even if we
>> eventually get these tests mostly working in most places, whether they
>> will actually catch any bugs.

> The existing tests are not very useful, but it certainly would be nice 
> to have some infrastructure like TAP to write useful tests.

Yeah.  I think this is an "if you build it they will come" situation.
The existing tests are really only proof-of-concept; if we can get the
infrastructure to the point of being widely usable, we can certainly
use it to write many more-useful tests.

So I'm not for giving up and ripping it out in the near future.  But I do
think there's a lot of test-infrastructure work left here to get to the
point of being "widely usable", and I'm not sure if anyone is committed to
making that happen.

But let's stop talking in generalities and try to quantify where we think
the bar needs to be set.  Is it okay to depend on non-core CPAN modules
at all?  How old versions of Perl, Test::More, etc do we need it to work
with?

For my own purposes, I'd be satisfied if it ran on RHEL6 and reasonably
recent OS X.  For RHEL6, I'd not want to have to install any CPAN modules
other than the versions supplied by Red Hat (which means no Test::More
subplans).  This platform is only four years old, if you can't cope with
that then you're definitely too bleeding-edge to be a portable test
infrastructure.
        regards, tom lane