Re: TAP test breakage on MacOS X

I wrote:
> Also, noticing that what you're using is evidently Perl 5.12, I'm
> wondering whether our TAP test scripts require a fairly new Perl version.
> I recall some of my Salesforce colleagues griping that the TAP scripts
> didn't work with older Perls.

Well, they definitely don't work with Perl 5.10.0: on an older Mac
box I get

/bin/sh ../../../config/install-sh -c -d tmp_check/log
make -C ../../.. DESTDIR='/Users/tgl/pgsql/src/bin/initdb'/tmp_check/install install
>'/Users/tgl/pgsql/src/bin/initdb'/tmp_check/log/install.log2>&1
 
cd . && TESTDIR='/Users/tgl/pgsql/src/bin/initdb'
PATH="/Users/tgl/pgsql/src/bin/initdb/tmp_check/install/Users/tgl/testversion/bin:$PATH"
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH='/Users/tgl/pgsql/src/bin/initdb/tmp_check/install/Users/tgl/testversion/lib'PGPORT='65440' prove
--ext='.pl'-I ../../../src/test/perl/ --verbose t/
 
Unknown option: ext
make: *** [check] Error 1

How badly do we need --ext?  It looks to me from a quick perusal of the
prove man page that we could replace both --ext and the t/ argument with
an explicit list of test file names, which'd be easy enough to generate
with $(wildcard).

On RHEL6, which has perl 5.10.1, we seem to dodge that bullet
but nonetheless most of the tests get skipped because:

1..0 # SKIP version of Test::More is too old to support subplans
skipped: version of Test::More is too old to support subplans

So I remain of the opinion that the TAP tests need a lot of portability
work before they're going to be good for much.
        regards, tom lane