Meson has a lot of advantages over autoconf/make, primarily in ease-of-use and performance. Make meson the only build system used for testing and building the Debian documentation, but leave the RHEL documentation using autoconf/make for now so it gets some testing.
The Perl integration tests were migrated as faithfully as possible, but there was some cruft and a few unit tests that it did not make sense to migrate.
Also remove all Perl code made obsolete by this migration.
All unit, performance, and integration tests are now written in C but significant parts of the test harness remain to be migrated.
This has never been a problem for performance tests since they do not call functions that log at info level or above, but the upcoming integration tests may do so. In any case it is better to disable this functionality outside of unit tests.
This allows analysis of coverage failures that only happen in CI. It is not ideal since the report needs to be copied from the log output into an HTML file where it can be viewed, but better than nothing.
Per our policy to support five EOL versions of PostgreSQL, 9.3 is no longer supported by pgBackRest.
Remove all logic associated with 9.3 and update the tests.
Migrate generation of these files from help.xml to the intermediate documentation format. This allows us to share a lot of code that is already in C and remove duplicated code in Perl. More duplicate code can be removed in Perl once man generation is migrated.
Also update the unit test harness to allow testing of modules in the doc directory.
The tests expect the group name/id to match between the host system and the container. If there is a conflict rename the group with the required id to the expected name.
This could have unintended consequences but it seems reasonably safe since we control everything that runs in the container and there should never be any system processes running.
This was missed in the C unit test migration and since then a new test was added that was not setting its timezone correctly.
This feature exists to make sure the tests will run on systems with different timezones and has no impact on the core code.
The --no-log-timestamp option was missed when unit test building was migrated to C, which caused test timings to show up in the contributing guide. This caused no harm but did create churn in this file during releases.
Also improve the formatting when test timing is disabled.
Double spaces have fallen out of favor in recent years because they no longer contribute to readability.
We have been using single spaces and editing related paragraphs for some time, but now it seems best to update the remaining instances to avoid churn in unrelated commits and to make it clearer what spacing contributors should use.
Ubuntu 18.04 will be EOL before the next release, so update to the oldest available Debian version.
Also fix one incorrect return value type, a test cast, and adjust some test timeouts.
Bug Fixes:
* Skip writing recovery.signal by default for restores of offline backups. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot. Reported by Marcel Borger.)
Features:
* Block incremental backup (BETA). (Reviewed by John Morris, Stephen Frost, Stefan Fercot.)
Improvements:
* Keep only one all-default group index. (Reviewed by Stefan Fercot.)
Documentation Improvements:
* Add explicit instructions for upgrading between 2.x versions. (Contributed by Christophe Courtois. Reviewed by David Steele.)
* Remove references to SSH made obsolete when TLS was introduced.
Running valgrind and backtrace together has been causing tests to timeout in CI, mostly likely due to limited resources. This has not been a problem in normal development environments.
Since it is still important to run backtraces for debugging, split the u22 test that was doing all this work to run coverage and backtrace together and valgrind-only as a separate test. As a bonus these tests run faster separately and since they run in parallel the total execution time is faster.
The libbacktrace feature has not been working since the move to meson because libbacktrace detection was not added to the meson build. Add libbacktrace to meson and improve the feature so that it can be compiled into release builds.
The prior implementation fetched line numbers with each stack trace push. Not only was this slow but it missed any functions that were not being tracked on our stack.
Instead just examine the backtrace when an error happens and merge it with the info we have on our stack. If the backtrace is not available then the output remains as before.
Also remove --backtrace from test.pl since the library is now auto-detected.
Leave this library out of the production build for now to give it a little time to shake out in testing.
When this code was migrated to C the unit tests were not included because there were more important priorities at the time.
This also requires some adjustments to coverage because of the new code location.
Our new policy is to support ten versions of PostgreSQL, the five supported releases and the last five EOL releases. As of PostgreSQL 15, that means 9.0/9.1/9.2 are no longer supported by pgBackRest.
Remove all logic associated with 9.0/9.1/9.2 and update the tests.
Document the new support policy.
Update InfoPg to read/write control versions for the history in backup.info, since we can no longer rely on the mappings being available. In theory this could have been an issue after removing 8.3/8.4 if anybody was using a version that old.
The option to specify the path to psql was shown in the command-line help as --psql-bin but the option was actually named --pgsql-bin.
Rename to match the help so they are consistent.
All unit and performance tests are now built by the C harness.
Remove all unit/performance test build code from Perl.
Remove code from C harness that is no longer used. This code was included so the C harness could be run separately, but that is no longer needed with this full integration.
The C test harness is used for unit tests from the Perl harness where possible. Currently, unit tests can be run in the C harness when --no-coverage is specified and --profile is not specified.
C harness tests work on meson 0.45.
The C harness runs with valgrind by default. Valgrind can be disabled with --no-valgrind.
Also rebuild containers to add meson and update the documentation so that meson builds will work (even though we don't do them yet).
Both have newer gcc and OpenSSL 3.
Fedora 36 runs horribly slow with valgrind enabled so run the valgrind tests on Ubuntu 22.04. Fedora 36 has a newer gcc so it is still worth testing on.
Meson is a new build system that offers simpler syntax and superior performance to autoconf/make. In addition, Windows is supported natively.
The Meson build appears complete, but currently is used only for auto-generation of code and the host build of pgbackrest. Some container upgrades will be required before Meson can be used for container builds.
Also patch the Debian package to force autoconf/make rather than Meson.
These files were never intended to be compiled on their own so the .c extension was a bit misleading. In particular Meson does not like .c files that are not intended to be compiled independently.
Leave header files as is since they are already protected against being included more than once and are never expected to be compiled.
Remove VM_OS_REPO since it is no longer required.
Rebalance PostgreSQL versions for more efficient test times.
Always print version of PostgreSQL when testing. This helps verify that new minor releases are being used.
Integration expect log testing was originally used as a rough-and-ready way to make sure that certain code paths were being executed before the unit tests existed. Now that we have 100% unit test coverage (with expect log testing) the value of the integration expect tests seems minimal at best.
But they do cause numerous issues:
- Maintenance of the expect code and replacements that are required to keep logs reproducible.
- Even a trivial change can cause massive churn in the expect logs, e.g. d9088b2. These changes should be minutely audited but since the expect logs have little value now it is seldom worth the effort.
- The OS version used to do expect testing (RHEL7) can only be used to test one version of PostgreSQL. This makes it hard to balance the PostgreSQL version testing between OS versions.
- When a commit affects expect logs it is not clear (especially for new developers) how to regenerate them and our contributing guide is silent on the issue.
The goal is to migrate the integration tests to C and expect testing is not part of that plan. It seems best to get rid of them now.
This helps rebalance some of the tests that are running long, i.e. d9 and u20.
I would be better to move more PostgreSQL versions to d9, but the base VM does not contain more versions. New minor versions will be out later in the week so that seems a better time to be rebuilding containers.
PostgreSQL 15 drops support for exclusive backup and renames the start/stop backup commands.
This is based on the pgdg-testing repo since beta1 has not been released yet, but it seems unlikely that breaking changes will be made at this point. beta1 should be tagged just before our next release so we'll retest before the release.
Only set -DDEBUG_MEM for the modules currently being tested rather than globally.
Also run tests in a temp mem context. Running in the top context can confuse memory accounting when a new context is created in the top context.
The unit tests were ignoring stderr but nothing being output there was important. Now a test will fail if there is anything on stderr.
This makes it easier to work with -fsanitize, which outputs to stderr.
The /etc/profile.d/lang.sh script was causing issues but it does not exist on amd64, so it seems the easiest thing was to remove it.
Fix how 32-bit VMs are determined now that another 64-bit architecture has been added.
And remove some obsolete VM hashes.
This flag was only being used by the backup command after manifestNewBuild() and had no other uses. There was a time when it was important for integration testing but the unit tests now fulfill this role.
Since backup is the only code concerned with the primary flag, move the code into the backup module.
We don't have any cross-version testing but this change was tested manually with the most recent version of pgBackRest to make sure it was tolerant of the missing primary info. When an older version of pgBackRest loads a newer manifest the primary flag will always be set to false, which is fine since it is not used.
There is no evidence that users need 8.3/8.4 anymore but it does cost us in terms of development and testing, especially now that we have a number of new backup/restore features planned.
It seems to make sense to remove this support now. If there are users who need to use/migrate from these versions they can use an older version of pgBackRest.
A CHECK() worked exactly like ASSERT() except that it was compiled into production code. However, over time many checks have been added that should not throw AssertError, which should be reserved for probable coding errors.
Allow the error code to be specified so other error types can be thrown. Also add a human-readable message since many of these could be seen by users even when there is no coding error.
Update coverage exceptions for CHECK() to match ASSERT() since all conditions will never be covered.
Since CentOS 8 will be EOL at the end of the year it makes sense to do this now. The centos:8 image is still used in documentation.xml because changes there require manual testing, which will need to be done at a later date. The changes are not user-facing, however, and can be done at any time.
Also update CentOS references to RHEL since that is what we are emulating for testing purposes.
