build testsuite or not?

[Jens Petersen]

Thanks, Ben for your helpful reply.

Okay then I think I will disable the testsuite for most Fedora builds then.
I never really look at them these days any more to be honest.

Cheers, Jens


On 31 May 2018 at 00:32, Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com> wrote:
> 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
>