Hi,

"Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de> writes:

> Hi,
>
> A large part of the build time is being consumed by tests … could we
> separate those phases so a package whose tests succeeded once does not
> have to be rebuild just because its package got garbage collected?
>
> (⇒ keep the test result (boolean) longer than the build result)
>
> Keeping just a boolean that says whether the tests for a given hash
> succeeded could make that pretty cheap and it could avoid half the build
> time for packages that got garbage collected before.

As it stands it's really not possible, as

1) testing is part of the build process itself and
2) we can't look-up any stateful info like this from the building
process (of course!)

But I would really like for tests to move out of build phases, the
advantages would be twofold: less build time for a lot of packages, and
better environment management for tests (we could rely on better
interaction with other packages, more complicated mocking, use linux
namespaces to their fullest extent, etc.).  That would require a huge
change to Guix though, so it's more of a dream than anything concrete.

Best,
-- 
Josselin Poiret