Thread: Clean up ancient test style

Many older tests where written in a style like

     SELECT '' AS two, i.* FROM INT2_TBL ...

where the first column indicated the number of expected result rows.
This has gotten increasingly out of date, as the test data fixtures
have expanded, so a lot of these don't match anymore and are misleading. 
  Moreover, this style isn't really necessary, since the psql output 
already shows the number of result rows.  (Perhaps this was different at 
some point?)

I'm proposing to clean all this up by removing all those extra columns.

The patch is very big, so I'm attaching a compressed version.  You can 
also see a diff oneline: 
https://github.com/postgres/postgres/compare/master...petere:test-cleanup

Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> Many older tests where written in a style like
>      SELECT '' AS two, i.* FROM INT2_TBL ...

> where the first column indicated the number of expected result rows.
> This has gotten increasingly out of date, as the test data fixtures
> have expanded, so a lot of these don't match anymore and are misleading. 
>   Moreover, this style isn't really necessary, since the psql output 
> already shows the number of result rows.  (Perhaps this was different at 
> some point?)

> I'm proposing to clean all this up by removing all those extra columns.

+1 for concept ... I didn't bother to check the patch in detail.

            regards, tom lane