Oninit® Log Ripper — Running the test suite

The Ripper ships with a small offline test family designed for operators building from source. Every test is pure C, linked against the freshly-built liboni_ripper.so, and runnable without an Informix engine, a target database, or any network access. The suite covers the formatting and translation paths that account for most of the customer-visible regressions in practice.

Most operators install via the RPM / DEB package and never need to run these tests. The suite is documented here for the operators who build from source, work on the codebase, or want a quick sanity-check that a clean checkout produces a working library.

make check — offline suite

. /home/informix/etc/setcsdk
make check

Builds every test binary if needed, runs them in order, and returns a clean PASS / FAIL summary with a process exit code (0 if every test passed; 1 if any failed). The exit code makes the target a clean gate for CI or pre-commit hooks.

Typical output on a green build:

——— running offline test suite ———

[test/dialect_test]
... per-cell PASS lines ...
  test/dialect_test: PASS

[test/buffer_test]
... per-cell PASS lines ...
  test/buffer_test: PASS

[test/build_col_spec_test]
... per-case PASS lines ...
26 passed, 0 failed
  test/build_col_spec_test: PASS

——— ALL OFFLINE TESTS PASSED (3) ———

Tests in the offline suite

make tests — build but don't run

make tests

Builds every test binary in the suite, including the live ones (test/dialect_live_test) that make check skips. Useful when an operator wants to run the live test separately against a real Informix engine.

Live tests — opt-in

The live test (test/dialect_live_test) exercises the rewriter against an actual Informix engine via the CSDK, covering the cases that need a connection (qualifier round-trip through dttoasc / intoasc, locale-driven decimal-separator behaviour, etc.). It's kept out of make check because the suite is meant to be runnable without any DB infrastructure.

To run it manually after make tests:

export INFORMIXSERVER=<server>
./test/dialect_live_test

The live test exits cleanly when no INFORMIXSERVER is set — running it in an environment without an Informix engine is safe; it just reports the skip and returns 0.

Per-test direct invocation

Each test is a standalone binary; running it directly gives more verbose output than the make check summary. Useful when a failure surfaces and the operator wants to see which specific case failed.

./test/dialect_test            # all dialect cells with verbose output
./test/buffer_test             # buffer subsystem cases
./test/build_col_spec_test     # DECIMAL/DATETIME/INTERVAL cases + ALTER regression

Each binary returns exit 0 on all-pass, exit 1 on any failure.

Adding a new test

Drop the source at test/<name>_test.c (the _test suffix is convention, not a hard requirement) and add the name to TEST_BINS_OFFLINE in the Makefile. The generic test/%: test/%.c $(LIB_REAL) pattern rule picks up the build automatically; the check target's runner iterates TEST_BINS_OFFLINE and reports PASS / FAIL based on exit codes.

For tests that need an Informix engine (or any other external infrastructure), add the binary to TEST_BINS_LIVE instead. Those are built by make tests but skipped by make check.

What the suite does NOT cover

The offline suite is deliberately narrow: it covers formatting, translation, and the buffer subsystem — the parts that are state-of-machine-only and can be exercised without external infrastructure. End-to-end replay verification against real targets (PostgreSQL / MySQL / MariaDB / Db2 / Oracle / MSSQL via ODBC / Informix) lives in test/run_test.sh -t <mode> which spins up the source DB harness, runs the ripper, replays against a target, and diffs the source vs. target rows via Informix UNLOAD. That's a separate operational test, not part of make check, because it requires the target infrastructure to be provisioned and accessible.