[bgunebakan]

Summary of the changes / Why this is an improvement

The macOS test jobs fail randomly in the CrateLayer tests, for example in https://github.com/crate/crate-python/actions/runs/40619105323/job/122588489678. The logs are also hard to read, because pytest prints the captured output of every passing test.

This PR fixes flakiness of the TestLayer and enable caching for crateDB for faster run time. and reduces verbose to have clean pipeline logs.

What changed?

• Biggest change is log size, run logs dropped 4,815 → 970 lines −80%, retry warnings 1,030 → 0
• macos-latest job run dropped 6.0 → 4.0 min, −33% difference
• Runner time per run (all 8 jobs) 21.2 → 15.4 min, −27% difference
• Log quality is improved, the fix get rid of the retry logs
• Bug found and fixed. When crate_config pointed to a directory, CrateLayer passed that directory's parent to CrateDB as path.conf.

Checklist

• Link to issue this PR refers to (if applicable): Fixes #???

[florinutz]

looks good

[florinutz]

since start now returns an error and before this it didn't, and since this might concern other repos too (such as crate's blackbox tests and pytest-cratedb) is this more than a Testing change - maybe Breaking?

[bgunebakan]

Thanks, good point. crate.testing.layer ships with package, I checked that and crate/crate blackbox and crate/pytest-cratedb does not use this anymore. They shouldn't be affected with this change.

[mergify]

This pull request does not currently match the merge queue conditions, so it cannot be queued from here. The box comes back if it matches again.