> - Manage node information using package/class PostgresNode.pm and have > RecoveryTest use it. I have actually made PostgresNode bare-bone and simple > on purpose: one can initialize the node, append configuration parameters to > it and manage it through start/stop/restart (we may want to add reload and > promote actually if needed).
This looks great as a starting point. I think we should make TestLib depend on PostgresNode instead of the other way around. I will have a look at that (I realize this means messing with the existing tests).
Makes sense. My thoughts following that is that we should keep a track of the nodes started as an array which is part of TestLib, with PGHOST set once at startup using tempdir_short. That's surely an refactoring patch somewhat independent of the recovery test suite. I would not mind writing something among those lines if needed.
> I have also arrived at the conclusion that it is not really worth > adding a node status flag in PostgresNode because the port number > saved there is sufficient when doing free port lookup, and the list of > nodes used in a recovery test are saved in an array.
I don't disagree with this in principle, but I think the design that you get a new PostgresNode object by calling get_free_port is strange. I think the port lookup code should be part of either TestLib or PostgresNode, not RecoveryTest.
I'd vote for TestLib. I have written PostgresNode this way to allow users to set up arbitrary port numbers if they'd like to do so. That's more flexible.