On 2025-10-10 Fr 1:52 AM, Sadhuprasad Patro wrote:
Hi all,
I've noticed that many TAP tests in the codebase make sub-optimal use of the "ok()"
function. Specifically, ok()
is often used for expressions involving comparison operators or regex matches, which is not ideal because other Test::More functions provide much clearer diagnostic messages when tests fail.
For example, instead of writing:
ok($var =~ /foo/, "found foo")
it’s better to write:
like($var, /foo/, "found foo")
I experimented by modifying a TAP test in
src/bin/pg_dump
to deliberately fail using
ok()
. The failure output was quite minimal and didn’t give much detail:
Then I changed the same test to use like()
instead of ok()
, which produced much more informative diagnostics:
# '--
# '
# doesn't match '(?^m:^CREATE TABLE public1\.table_one)' t/
005_pg_dump_filterfile.pl .. 41/? # Looks like you failed 1 test of 108.
t/
005_pg_dump_filterfile.pl .. Dubious, test returned 1 (wstat 256, 0x100)
Failed 1/108 subtests
Test Summary Report
-------------------
t/
005_pg_dump_filterfile.pl (Wstat: 256 (exited 1) Tests: 108 Failed: 1)
Failed test: 2
Non-zero exit status: 1
Based on this, I’ve replaced all such uses of ok()
with the more appropriate is()
, isnt()
, like()
, unlike()
, and cmp_ok()
functions, depending on the test case.
Please find the attached patch implementing these improvements...
Great, I think this is a definite improvement. I saw someone recently complaining about this overuse of ok(), so thanks for doing the work to improve it.
cheers
andrew
--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com