[FLINK-15474] In TypeSerializerUpgradeTestBase, create serializer snapshots "on demand"

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Won't Do
• Affects Version/s: 1.9.0, 1.10.0
• Component/s: API / Type Serialization System, Tests
• Assignee: Aljoscha Krettek
• Reporter: Aljoscha Krettek
• Created: 03/Jan/20 14:31
• Updated: 09/Jun/20 10:45
• Resolved: 09/Jun/20 10:45

Description

Currently, we store binary snapshots in the repository for all the different serializer upgrade test configurations (see linked POC for which snapshots are there for just the POJO serializer). This is hard to maintain, because someone has to go back and generate snapshtos from previous Flink versions and add them to the repo when updating the tests for a new Flink version. It's also problematic from a repository perspective because we keep piling up binary snapshots.

Instead, we can create a snapshot "on demand" from a previous Flink version by using a classloader that has the previous Flink jar.

I created a POC which demonstrated the approach: https://github.com/aljoscha/flink/tree/jit-serializer-test-base. The advantage is that we don't need binary snapshots in the repo anymore, updating the tests to a newer Flink version should be as easy as adding a new migration version and Flink download url. The downside is that the test now downloads Flink releases (in the PoC this is done using the caching infra introduced for e2e tests), which is costly and also re-generates the snapshots for every test, which is also costly. The test time (minus downloading) goes up from about 300 ms to roughly 6 seconds. That's not something I would call a unit test. We could call these "integration tests" (or even e2e tests) and only run them nightly. Side note, we don't have test coverage for serializer upgrades from 1.8 and 1.9 currently, so even doing it nightly would be an improvement.

Issue Links

• blocks: FLINK-13632 Port serializer upgrade tests to TypeSerializerUpgradeTestBase