Perl for new PostgreSQL and pgTAP

[Robert L. Kirby]

While preparing to install PostgreSQL 11.18 and the latest pgTAP on a fresh machine, it seems reasonable to do any perl upgrades and module downloads first from perl 5.18.2, which comes with MacOS 10.12.6 Sierra (it's an older machine). If I remember from the last pgTAP installation, pgTAP complains if it doesn't find what it needs but it seems safer to have an appropriate version of perl installed before compiling PostgreSQL with perl support, which is needed before installing pgTAP.

Perhaps the pgTAP installation documentation should mention which minimal version of perl and its modules should be installed for those developers not regularly working with perl.

Bob Kirby

[David E. Wheeler]

On Dec 7, 2022, at 16:40, Robert L. Kirby <kirb...@gmail.com> wrote:

> While preparing to install PostgreSQL 11.18 and the latest pgTAP on a fresh machine, it seems reasonable to do any perl upgrades and module downloads first from perl 5.18.2, which comes with MacOS 10.12.6 Sierra (it's an older machine). If I remember from the last pgTAP installation, pgTAP complains if it doesn't find what it needs but it seems safer to have an appropriate version of perl installed before compiling PostgreSQL with perl support, which is needed before installing pgTAP.

pgTAP itself does not require Perl. The Makefile uses Perl as part of the installation, though. So it doesn’t matter what version of Perl you use, to be honest, 5.18 is fine.

If you use pg_prove, however, that *does* require Perl, but any version from 5.6 is supported.

> Perhaps the pgTAP installation documentation should mention which minimal version of perl and its modules should be installed for those developers not regularly working with perl.

It really doesn’t matter, 5.6 is the minimal version, and it came out in March 2000! I think you’re good.

D

[Robert L. Kirby]

In order to build PostgreSQL 11.18 on MacOS 10.12.6 Sierra with XCode 7.3.1, two Terminal (bash) commands were needed before running configure using its "--enable-tap-tests" argument:

  sudo cpan App::cpanminus

  sudo cpanm IPC::Run

Perhaps these privileged commands would not be needed to use pgTAP without enabling TAP on PostgreSQL or on some later version of MacOS.

Bob Kirby

[David E. Wheeler]

On Dec 17, 2022, at 18:37, Robert L. Kirby <kirb...@gmail.com> wrote:

> In order to build PostgreSQL 11.18 on MacOS 10.12.6 Sierra with XCode 7.3.1, two Terminal (bash) commands were needed before running configure using its "--enable-tap-tests" argument:
> sudo cpan App::cpanminus
> sudo cpanm IPC::Run
>
> Perhaps these privileged commands would not be needed to use pgTAP without enabling TAP on PostgreSQL or on some later version of MacOS.

That feature has nothing to do with the pgTAP project, which is about writing tests for Postgres extensions. It’s part of the core Postgres source. I suggest posting to https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-hackers/ instead.

Best,

David