Feedback-ID: id4a34324:Fastmail
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2024 18:49:11 -0700
From: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
To: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
Cc: Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>,
	PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: RFC: adding pytest as a supported test framework
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Hi,

On 2024-06-10 16:46:56 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> 
> On 2024-06-10 Mo 16:04, Andres Freund wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > 
> > Just for context for the rest the email: I think we desperately need to move
> > off perl for tests. The infrastructure around our testing is basically
> > unmaintained and just about nobody that started doing dev stuff in the last 10
> > years learned perl.

> Andres,
> 
> I get that you don't like perl.

I indeed don't particularly like perl - but that's really not the main
issue. I've already learned [some of] it. What is the main issue is that I've
also watched several newer folks try to write tests in it, and it was not
pretty.


> But it's hard for me to take this terribly seriously. "desperately" seems
> like massive overstatement at best.

Shrug.


> As for what up and coming developers learn, they mostly don't learn C
> either, and that's far more critical to what we do.

C is a a lot more useful to to them than perl. And it's actually far more
widely known these days than perl. C does teach you some reasonably
low-level-ish understanding of hardware. There are gazillions of programs
written in C that we'll have to maintain for decades. I don't think that's
comparably true for perl.


> I'm not sure what part of the testing infrastructure you think is
> unmaintained. For example, the last release of Test::Simple was all the way
> back on April 25.

IPC::Run is quite buggy and basically just maintained by Noah these days.

Greetings,

Andres Freund