Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2024 16:48:29 -0700
From: Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com>
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>,
	Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>,
	PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: RFC: adding pytest as a supported test framework
Message-ID: <20240611234829.9d@rfd.leadboat.com>
References: <CAOYmi+kThkM9Z87u=R_Wi7fCor2i+UZKAyq0UCyprzCwTQvqgA@mail.gmail.com>
 <20240610200411.byj6sv2vpgol6wcf@awork3.anarazel.de>
 <00c5efe6-1abb-42f8-a9a7-ed3a055c4b92@dunslane.net>
 <20240611014911.khxuai5fy2ssbmiw@awork3.anarazel.de>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <20240611014911.khxuai5fy2ssbmiw@awork3.anarazel.de>
User-Agent: Mutt/2.2.12 (2023-09-09)
Archived-At: <https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20240611234829.9d%40rfd.leadboat.com>
Precedence: bulk

On Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 06:49:11PM -0700, Andres Freund wrote:
> On 2024-06-10 16:46:56 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> > On 2024-06-10 Mo 16:04, Andres Freund wrote:
> > > 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.

> > 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.

If we're going to test in a non-Perl language, I'd pick C over Python.  There
would be several other unlikely-community-choice languages I'd pick over
Python (C#, Java, C++).  We'd need a library like today's Perl
PostgreSQL::Test to make C-language tests nice, but the same would apply to
any new language.

I also want the initial scope to be the new language coexisting with the
existing Perl tests.  If a bulk translation ever happens, it should happen
long after the debut of the new framework.  That said, I don't much trust a
human-written bulk language translation to go through without some tests
accidentally ceasing to test what they test in Perl today.