Hi all
I've been taking a look at the Perl test infrastructure ( src/test/perl ) for writing multi-node tests, starting with PostgresNode.pm and I have a few comments based on my first approach to the code "cold".
I think a README in src/test/perl/ would be very helpful. It's currently not at all clear how to go about using the new test infrastructure when first looking at it, particularly adding new test suites. Also a summary of available test facilities and some short examples or pointers to where they can be found ( src/bin/, src/test/ssl, etc).
I want to add tests for failover slots but I'm not sure where to put them or how to set up the test skeleton. So I went looking, and I could use confirmation that the below is roughly right so I can write it up for some quickstart docs.
It *looks* like one needs to create a Makefile with:
subdir = src/test/mytests
top_builddir = ../../..
include $(top_builddir)/src/Makefile.global
clean:
rm -rf ./tmp_check
Then create a subdir src/test/mytests/t and in it put files named
001_sometest.pl etc. Each of which should import PostgresNode and generally then create new instances indirectly via the PostgresNode::get_new_node function rather than by using the constructor. Then init and start the server and run tests. Like:
use strict;
use warnings;
use PostgresNode;
use TestLib;
use Test::More tests => 1;
diag 'Setting up node';
my $node = get_new_node('master');
$node->init;
$node->start;
my $ret = $node->psql('postgres', 'SELECT 1;');
is($ret, '1', 'simple SELECT');
$node->teardown_node;
Knowledge of perl's Test::More is required since most of the suite is built on it.
The suite should be added to src/test/Makefile's ALWAYS_SUBDIRS entry.
Sound about right? I can tidy that up a bit and turn it into a README and add a reference to that to the public tap docs to tell users where to go if they want to write more tests.
I don't know how many suites we'll want - whether it'll be desirable to have a few suites with lots of tests or to have lots of suites with just a few tests. I'm planning on starting by adding a suite named 'replication' and putting some tests for failover slots in there. Reasonable?
(BTW, the ssl tests don't seem to use a bunch of the facilities provided by PostgresNode, instead rolling their own, so they don't serve as a good example.)