Background

Running compatibility tests locally is currently slow and inflexible. When testing a change to the compatibility test framework, you can specify the type of compatibility test (e.g. newer, older, patch) but cannot specify which release series/versions to test against. This forces every local run to go through all supported release series/versions, leading to unnecessarily long test runs.

Goal

Make local compatibility testing faster and more targeted by allowing the caller to specify which release series to test against.

Proposed Change

Add a new command argument (e.g. -v <release>) to the compatibility test runner so that only the specified release series is tested. For example, passing -v 8.0 would run compatibility testing only between 8.0 and 7.0, and 8.0 and 8.2, rather than all supported release series.

The approach taken for compatibility-test-against-develop (WT-16466) — using 2 separate compile Evergreen tasks and a dependent test task — can potentially be leveraged here as well.

Context

This work is part of a broader effort to improve WiredTiger compatibility tests. See WT-17179 for details.