Re: New unified regression test driver

Lamar Owen writes:

> That said, I have a request -- since the binary distributions might
> possibly be installed on machines with no make and no compiler, I would
> like to see the regression tests be reduced to a simple script and
> driver that could be simply invoked with no need for make.  Binary-only
> users might want to regress a little, too.

This was originally one of my implementation goals, but it's a bit tricky.  
Some of the SQL input files contains absolute paths as part of CREATE
FUNCTION or COPY commands.  We'd have to patch up these paths as part of
the installation run.  That's terribly inelegant and it would probably
break something else I'm thinking about.  (Automatically generating
install manifests by substituting something clever for the $(INSTALL) make
variable.  You might be interested in this too.  Stay tuned.)

That said, the new script should make things a bit easier for you because
it is reasonably standalone, allows parallel and serial regression tests,
and has command line options to find the input and output files.  The ugly
details about how to install the right files I would like to leave up to
the packager right now.

One thing I thought of was that perhaps the regression test driver could
substitute the correct paths at run time rather than at build time.  But
that would break backward compatibility with the old drivers, and as we
haven't even settled on the new one yet, it's probably an inopportune time
to try it now.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut      peter_e@gmx.net       http://yi.org/peter-e/