build testsuite or not?

[Ben Gamari]

Jens Petersen <juhpetersen at gmail.com> writes:

> Okay I have one more question about my packaging of ghc for Fedora.
>
> For long I always build the testsuite for every release perf build on all archs
> (for an example see the build.log links on
> https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=1086491).
>
> Is this a useful meaningful thing to do?
>
> I thought it good to have it as a reference for ghc builds on Fedora
> and EPEL, but it does add a considerable amount of time to builds
> (specially for the slower ARM arch's)  so it is not without cost.
>
At the moment I wouold say that our testsuite is unreliable enough in
non-validate configurations that this has relatively little value. This
is something we are working on fixing and hopefully things will be more
reliable in the future.

I generally validate the tree prior to cutting a release. This of course
won't catch environment- and distribution-specific issues, but I think
it's a pretty good proxy for correctness.

In other words, unlesss you find yourself looking at the testsuite
output yourself, I think it would be fine to disable it.

> So I am wondering how useful it is to continue running the testsuite
> for each "production" build I do.
> What do others and other distros, etc do for final releases?
>
As far as I know neither Debian nor NixOS run GHC's testsuite.

Cheers,

- Ben

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