On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Peter Eisentraut<pete...@gmx.net> wrote: > On tor, 2009-08-27 at 09:58 -0400, Robert Haas wrote: >> To get positive results in which you can have confidence, you have to >> know that the testing which was done actually did a reasonably good >> job exercising the code in a way that would have flushed out bugs, had >> any been present. That sounds a lot like the definition of a >> regression test suite. Of course, we have that already, but it's >> nowhere near comprehensive. Maybe we should be looking at an expanded >> test suite that runs on a time scale of hours rather than seconds. >> Actually, didn't Peter talk about something like this at PGCon? > > Let's look at it this way: If I were writing a compiler, then I would > have two main test approaches. First, I would have an in-tree test > suite that compiles a bunch of example code snippets and checks that the > results are reasonable. Call that a regression test. It would be > informed by code coverage analysis and previously reported bugs. > Second, as part of my release cycle, I would have an agenda to try to > compile a large set of real programs against my new compiler version. > I would do that during the beta period. You will notice that GCC pretty > much operates that way. > > We have regression tests. They could and should be expanded. That's a > developer job, and we can start working on that now. But this > discussion was about what to do during beta. And I think during beta > you want to test PostgreSQL against a large set of real applications. > But we could try to clarify how to actually do that in an organized way. > > Now, if you want to improve the regression tests, I would suggest going > through the commits since 8.4beta and since 8.4.0 final release and ask > how these problems could have been prevented or caught earlier. I > suppose a test suite for WAL might be part of the answer, but a closer > analysis might be insightful.
What I want to do is address the concern about too much of any given year being consumed by beta and CommitFest. I'm not sure I know how to do that though. ...Robert -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers