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 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.
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.
The code is not completely reflowed yet so there are some cases that uncrustify will not catch. The formatting will be improved over time.
Some block of code require special formatting so have been surrounded with the {uncrustify-off}/{uncrustify-on} markers. These exceptions should be kept to a minimum.
Add --code-format (to reformat code) and --code-format-check (to check formatting) to test.pl.
Add a CI test that will check code formatting. Code must be correctly formatted before it can be merge to integration.
Add documentation to the coding standards for code formatting.
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.
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.
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).
Creating new binaries was convenient at first but has now become a maintenance issue.
Solve this by combining that into a single binary that takes an additional parameter to indicate which code should be built.
Also clean up path handling to make it easier to build code from the command line.
This makes the test code a bit simpler where we are listing a path but not following links.
Links in the repository can be used for testing but should never be committed to the main branch.
v0.45 ships with Ubuntu 18.04, which is currently the oldest distro we support. We may never do a Meson release on Ubuntu 18.04 but this allows us to start running unit tests with Meson in the meantime.
Some more granular options are not available so we use buildtype in more places.
The check for a in-tree autoconf/make build had to be removed since the filesystem APIs are not available.
Finally, alias_target was removed. This means that full paths must be used for build targets, which does not seem too bad. For instance, test/src/test-pgbackrest must now be used as a build target instead of simple test-pgbackrest.
The meson builds are still experimental so for now the configure/make build process is preferred for release builds. This message should help prevent any automated build systems from picking up meson instead.
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.
Maintaining the version interfaces was complicated by the fact that each interface needed to be in separate compilation unit to avoid type conflicts. This also meant that various build/test files needed to be updated to add the new interfaces.
Solve these problems by auto-generating all the interfaces into a single file. This is made possible by parsing defines and types out of the header files and creating macros to rename the types. At the end of the version interface everything is undef'd. Another benefit is that the auto-generated interfaces can be static and included directly into postgres/interface.c.
Since some code generation is now always required for tests, change --no-gen to --min-gen in test.pl.
It would also make sense to auto-generate the version defines in postgres/version.h, but that will be left for a future commit.
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.
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.
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.
These flags are used for all tests but it was not possible to add them to configure before the change in 046d6643. This is especially important for adhoc tests to ensure the flags are not forgotten.
Remove the flags from test make commands where they were being applied.
There is no change for production builds.
Command-line help is now generated at build time so it does not need to be committed. This reduces churn on commits that add configuration and/or update the help.
Since churn is no longer an issue, help.auto.c is bzip2 compressed to save space in the binary.
The Perl config parser (Data.pm) has been moved to doc/lib since the Perl build path is no longer required.
Likewise doc/xml/reference.xml has been moved to src/build/help/help.xml since it is required at build time.
If configure/make has been run in the src path it can conflict with tests, which may require different build options.
Also add a comment when rebuilding for code generation.
If the test path is inside the repo path then it can cause strange issues during testing because the entire repo path is duplicated into the test path so that all tests see a consistent view of the repo.
Another solution might be to pick a better test path name and exclude it from the rsync, but this fix at least addresses the immediate issue.
This was started in c5ae047e but did not include generation of parse.auto.c.
The parser has also been improved with better errors and multiple passes to reduce dependency on ordering and produce and cleaner output.
Option order resolution now includes cycle detection.
--smart is now the default mode. Since --dev is now just an alias for --no-optimize, remove it. --dev-test has been a noop for a while, so this seems like a good time to remove it.
Also make the C auto-generator skip writing files that have not changed to avoid updating the timestamp.
Parse enough of config.yaml to auto-generate config.auto.h and config.auto.c.
This commit implements most of the infrastructure needed to migrate the rest of the build code to C, but each set of auto-generated files will present its own challenges.
The build is now dependent on libyaml. At this point there is no need for a hard requirement, but that will come soon so it seems better to add the dependency now.
Update Ubuntu 12.04 to 16.04. Version 16.04 is recently EOL but testing on an old version is beneficial.
Update Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04.
Update Fedora 32 to 33. Version 34 would have been preferred but there were some build issues, i.e. the default shell did not work with configure, and after ksh was installed configure locked up.
Add --no-install-recommends to apt-get commands to save a bit of time and space.
Update test Dockerfile to run in multiple steps. This makes the container larger but also makes rebuilding after changes faster. The --squash option may be used to keep the container small.
Remove obsolete casts in protocol/parallel module. These casts were included in the original migration because Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit gcc required them, but Ubuntu 16.04 32-bit gcc complains. There is no production issue here since at this point in the code the file descriptors are guaranteed to be >= 0.
When running outside of our standard Vagrantfile the default will not be set correctly, so require the user to set it.
In any case, this option is primarily useful for reporting so note that in the command line help.
The tests worked fine on multiple architectures, but would only run "bare metal", i.e. tests that required containers could not be run.
Enable basic multi-architecture support by allowing containers to be built using whatever architecture the host supports. Also allow cached containers to be defined for multiple architectures in container.yaml.
Add a Dockerfile which can be used as a container for other containers to provide a consistent development environment.
The primary goal is to allow development on Mac M1 but other architectures should find these improvements useful.
Moving to YAML allows the configuration data to be read by C programs.
Also go back to using YAML::XS since it is the only implementation that has proper boolean support.
The real/all test could fill the ramdisk depending on which vm and pg version were selected.
Debug level should be fine for most purposes and the level can be increased when needed.
The unit test Makefile generation was a hodge-podge of constants and rules based on distros/versions that easily got out of date and did not work on an unknown system. All of this dates from the mixed Perl/C unit test implementation.
Instead use configure to generate most of the important Makefile variables, which allows the unit tests to run on multiple platforms, e.g. MacOS and FreeBSD.
There is plenty of work to be done here and not all the unit tests work on MacOS and FreeBSD for various reasons.
As a POC update the MacOS and FreeBSD tests on Cirrus-CI to run a few command unit tests.
MacOS has a very old version of rsync that does not support this option.
Rather than require a newer version of rsync exclude the option since the plan is to remove the requirement for it.
This is a more appropriate place for the check and means test.pl can avoid loading any XML files if --no-gen is specified.
The XML::Checker::Parser module originally selected for XML in Perl is not very portable so the requirement reduces the number of platforms where tests can be run.
Data required for parsing was spread between the config and defined modules, mostly for historical reasons because the same data was used by Perl.
Requiring all the parse rules to be accessed with function interfaces makes the code more complicated and new rules harder to implement.
Instead, move the data to the parse module so in the most complex cases no interface functions are needed. This reduces the total amount of code and paves the way for more complex parse rules.
The help data can be represented more compactly in a pack and this separates data needed for help from data needed for parsing, freeing each to have a more appropriate representation.
