Re: Two weeks to feature freeze

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alvaro Herrera [mailto:alvherre@dcc.uchile.cl]
> Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 10:00 PM
> To: Dann Corbit
> Cc: Tom Lane; Jason Earl; PostgreSQL-development
> Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Two weeks to feature freeze
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 09:25:08PM -0700, Dann Corbit wrote:
>
> Citing Tom Lane:
> > > I have been through crash-me in some detail, and it left a
> > > very bad taste in my mouth.  Don't bother holding it up as an
> > > example of good practice.
> >
> > Every single test in their list is interesting and useful.
>
> At least on the version I just saw there are several results
> with Postgres that are weird (table names > 500 chars?).

It does get silly at a point, but I have seen systems with 128
characters for table names, column names, etc.  Some people seem to like
it.  Not me.  Too much typing.

> Other things tested are clearly wrong (things that are =
> NULL,

Sounds like testing for the existence of a bug.
X = NULL
X <= NULL
X >= NULL
Etc. must always test false, regardless of the contents of X.  Test for
equality with NULL is a conformance error if NULL == NULL returns true.

> dates like '00-00-0000');

Not sure what that might even mean.

> results for Postgres that are
> wrong probably because they are trying a weird syntax. Etc.
>
> Things like that drive the credibility of the whole thing to
> the floor. Maybe something like this should exist for
> Postgres, but it's not crash-me.  Maybe the NIST compliance
> test is adequate.

So far, I have seen three problems pointed out (out of 600+ tests).
That's 0.5% defects.  Why not just drop the stupid tests, or bend them
to test for what they ought to be testing.

Besides those three, what other tests are bogus and why?