Proposal: run GHC API tests on fast

[Edward Z. Yang]

OK, I've gone ahead and done this.

Edward

Excerpts from Edward Z. Yang's message of 2014-05-30 01:55:35 +0100:
> Currently, most GHC API tests are not run on 'make fast',
> ostensibly because linking against the GHC API can take a while.
> I propose that change this, and run GHC API tests by default.
> Reasons:
> 
> 1. The GHC API is closely tied a lot of internal structure of GHC, so
> it's very easy to make a change, track it through the rest of the
> compiler, but forget to update the tests/documentation.
> 
> 2. We can boost this into poor man's testable documentation.  The idea
> is to duplicate all GHC API examples in the manual in the test suite,
> and have a comment on all of the examples asking the developer to update
> the manual. (Or we could automatically extract the snippets from the
> manual, but that's work and this I could do in a few minutes.)
> 
> 3. I don't think running these tests will add that much extra run
> time to the test suite; certainly interactively the time spent linking
> is unnoticeable.
> 
> Let's set a one week discussion period for this proposal.
> 
> Thanks,
> Edward