On Mon, Jul 25, 2022 at 11:35:12AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > Noah Misch <n...@leadboat.com> writes: > > On Mon, Jul 25, 2022 at 09:44:21AM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote: > >> Perhaps we should have a guard in system_or_bail() and/or system_log() > >> which bails if some element of @_ is undefined. > > +1, seeing how hard this is to diagnose. > > > That would be reasonable. Also reasonable to impose some long timeout, > > maybe > > 10x or 100x PG_TEST_TIMEOUT_DEFAULT, on calls to those functions. > > Why would it need to be more than PG_TEST_TIMEOUT_DEFAULT?
We run some long commands, like the parallel_schedule runs. Those currently use plain system(), but they probably should have used system_log() from a logging standpoint. If they had, PG_TEST_TIMEOUT_DEFAULT would have been too short. One could argue that anything that slow should declare its intent to be that slow, but that argument is getting into the territory of a policy change rather than a backstop for clearly-unintended longevity.
