Re: Query execution in Perl TAP tests needs work

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:

> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Sat, Sep 2, 2023 at 2:42 PM Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
>>>> How much burden is it? Would anyone actually mind?
>
>> ... At the same time, fallbacks can be a problem too,
>> because then you can end up with things that work one way on one
>> developer's machine (or BF machine) and another way on another
>> developer's machine (or BF machine) and it's not obvious that the
>> reason for the difference is that one machine is using a fallback and
>> the other is not.
>
> I agree with this worry.
>
>> In terms of what that faster and better thing might be, AFAICS, there
>> are two main options. First, we could proceed with the approach you've
>> tried here, namely requiring everybody to get Platypus::FFI. I find
>> that it's included in MacPorts on my machine, which is at least
>> somewhat of a good sign that perhaps this is fairly widely available.
>
> I did a bit of research on this on my favorite platforms, and did
> not like the results:
>
> RHEL8: does not seem to be packaged at all.
>
> Fedora 37: available, but the dependencies are a bit much:
>
> $ sudo yum install perl-FFI-Platypus
> Last metadata expiration check: 2:07:42 ago on Wed Oct 18 08:05:40 2023.
> Dependencies resolved.
> ================================================================================
>  Package                 Architecture Version               Repository     Size
> ================================================================================
> Installing:
>  perl-FFI-Platypus       x86_64       2.08-1.fc37           updates       417 k
> Installing dependencies:
>  libgfortran             x86_64       12.3.1-1.fc37         updates       904 k
>  libquadmath             x86_64       12.3.1-1.fc37         updates       206 k
>  libquadmath-devel       x86_64       12.3.1-1.fc37         updates        48 k
>  perl-FFI-CheckLib       noarch       0.29-2.fc37           updates        29 k
> Installing weak dependencies:
>  gcc-gfortran            x86_64       12.3.1-1.fc37         updates        12 M
>
> Transaction Summary
> ================================================================================
> Install  6 Packages
>
> Total download size: 14 M
> Installed size: 37 M
> Is this ok [y/N]: 
>
> gfortran?   Really??  I mean, I don't care about the disk space,
> but this is not promising for anyone who has to build it themselves.

The Fortran support for FFI::Platypus is in a separate CPAN distribution
(FFI-Platypus-Lang-Fortran), so that must be some quirk of the Fedora
packaging and not a problem for people building it themselves.  They
just need libffi and a working Perl/CPAN setup.

On Debian the only things besides Perl and core perl modules it
(build-)depends on are libffi, Capture::Tiny, FFI::Checklib (which
depends on File::Which), Test2::Suite and pkg-config.

- ilmari