Proposal to DROP SUPPORT of Postgres due to ongoing CI Instability

[Moumouls]

It seems that we have some CI fails
#6371
#6360
#6363

Sometimes Postgres error:

ERROR:  could not access file "$libdir/postgis-2.4": No such file or directory
The command "psql -c 'CREATE EXTENSION postgis;' -U postgres -d parse_server_postgres_adapter_test_database" failed and exited with 1 during .

Sometimes Push error:

PushController properly creates _PushStatus
  Message:
    Expected 'pending' to be 'running'.
  Stack:
    Error: Expected 'pending' to be 'running'.
        at <Jasmine>
        at reconfigureServer.then.then.then.then.then.catch.then (/home/travis/build/parse-community/parse-server/spec/PushController.spec.js:647:48)
        at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:68:7)
Pending:

Do you have any idea where the failures come from?

[davimacedo]

@Moumouls thanks for reporting. We need to figure it out. In the meantime, I managed to have your PRs tests passing.

[dplewis]

I tried to fix the postgres issue a while ago.

#6299

I could downgrade to 10 and see if that helps (originally was at 9.5 then jumped to 11). I don't know why its looking for postgis 2.4 (it should look for 2.5 and I don't know how to force it).

For the Push Status one I might be able to fix it indirectly.

[acinader]

I am just restarting builds to get them to pass. Not sustainable.

[davimacedo]

I've also done this for a long while now...

[acinader]

do you use postgres?

I really can't take the time to be able to test postgres.

I think we should take it out of testing and only add it back if someone who actually uses it in production can help.

[davimacedo]

I don't have any app using Postgres but I know there are some users out there using it. I am not sure about just removing it from the CI. I think we'd need to descontinue its support because if we remove it from the CI it will stop working sooner or later. Maybe we can think about moving it to a different repo with its own tests which would be pinned to use the current version of Parse till the moment someone join to maintain it. I'm not sure. I'm open to ideas because it is really consuming a lot of time to continue carrying it here and making sure that everything we do also passes on Postgres even though there are probably few users using it.

[cbaker6]

@acinader I use Postgres 11 and it was working well on parse-server 3.10. I might be able to help here, though I haven't done anything with CL before. If you point me to the files that's causing the issue, I can take a look.

On a sidetone, I do think there's a small issue with using it on 4.1.0 (I'm assuming it as it seems to have trouble adding a fields in some tables, I'm thinking this is whenever I'm adding a reference to another object in a table (I'm getting an error in parse_relation.c "errorMissingColumn", which I didn't get when running the same code in 3.10.0). I'm currently doing some tests and will post in "Issues" once I know more Update: Turns out this was an issue on my side and not the parse-server

[acinader]

Hi @cbaker6

I'd be glad to help out if I can. Having someone who is using postgres helping out would be awesome and is really a pre-requisite for us being able to continue to support postgres in a first class way.

You could also open a trivial pull request to set off a test. If it doesn't fail on the first try, I can just keep re-running it until it does break. It usually fails on the first try though.
So

1. we don't currently have an example of the failure that this issue cites (see @Moumouls issue above. he cites two errors). I see the first one frequently. Re-running has always fixed for me so far. Next time we get one, I won't re-rerun it so you can see what's going on.

2. for the new error between 3.10 and 4.1, if you could do a git bisect to find the commit that introduces the warning/error, that'd probably be a good place to start.

I can be of more help if we can slack each other in real time. Out channel is: parseopensource

[cbaker6]

If the fix works okay, can this be closed?