Re: RFC: adding pytest as a supported test framework

On Sun, 16 Jun 2024 at 23:04, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Jun 15, 2024 at 6:00 PM Melanie Plageman
> <melanieplageman@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Writing a new test framework in a popular language that makes it more
> > likely that more people will write more tests and test infrastructure
> > is such a completely different thing than suggesting we rewrite
> > Postgres in Rust that I feel that this comparison is unfair and,
> > frankly, a distraction from the discussion at hand.
>
> I don't really agree with this.
> <snip>
> it's not *as* problematic if some tests are
> written in one language and others in another as it would be if
> different parts of the backend used different languages, and it
> wouldn't be *as* hard if at some point we decided we wanted to convert
> all remaining code to the new language.

Honestly, it sounds like you actually do agree with each other. It
seems you interpreted Melanie her use of "thing" as "people wanting to
use Rust/Python in the Postgres codebase" while I believe she probably
meant "all the problems and effort involved in the task making that
possible''. And afaict from your response, you definitely agree that
making it possible to use Rust in our main codebase is a lot more
difficult than for Python for our testing code.

> But, would I feel respected and valued as a participant in
> that project? Would I have to use weird tools and follow arcane and
> frustrating processes? If I did, *that* would make me give up. I don't
> want to say that the choice of programming language doesn't matter at
> all, but it seems to me that it might matter more because it's a
> symptom of being unwilling to modernize things rather than for its own
> sake.

I can personally definitely relate to this (although I wouldn't frame
it as strongly as you did). Postgres development definitely requires
weird tools and arcane processes (imho) when compared to most other
open source projects. The elephant in the room is of course the
mailing list development flow. But we have some good reasons for using
that[^1]. But most people have some limit on the amount of weirdness
they are willing to accept when wanting to contribute, and the mailing
list pushes us quite close to that limit for a bunch of people
already. Any additional weird tools/arcane processes might push some
people over that limit.

We've definitely made big improvements in modernizing our development
workflow over the last few years though: We now have CI (cfbot), a
modern build system (meson), and working autoformatting (requiring
pgindent on commit). These improvements have been very noticeable to
me, and I think we should continue such efforts. I think allowing
people to write tests in Python is one of the easier improvements that
we can make.

[^1]: Although I think those reasons apply much less to the
documentation, maybe we could allow github contributions for just
those.