Re: shortening the git test suite

["Gábor Boskovits" <boskovits@gmail.com>]

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Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> ezt írta (időpont: 2018. júl. 5., Cs
11:22):

>
> Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:
> >
> >> Hi Guix,
> >>
> >> git takes a very long time to build, because it has an extensive test
> >> suite.  Most of the time is spent in running the SVN interoperability
> >> tests, though, which are not really all that interesting for most uses
> >> of git.
> >>
> >> The Makefile says this:
> >>
> >>   # Define NO_SVN_TESTS if you want to skip time-consuming SVN
> interoperability
> >>   # tests.  These tests take up a significant amount of the total test
> time
> >>   # but are not needed unless you plan to talk to SVN repos.
> >>
> >> What do you think about disabling the SVN tests in the git package?
> >
> > This sounds similar to the discussion we had earlier about treating
> > tests as a special case:
> >
> > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-04/msg00071.html
> >
> > I felt that the conclusion of that thread was basically that if someone
> > is concerned about the build time, then they ought to be able to use
> > substitutes to speed things up, and we should continue to run as many
> > tests as possible in order to discover problems sooner.
>
> What I’m worried about is availability of substitutes.  When we keep
> changing packages on the “master” branch that have very expensive test
> suites then we accept that people won’t have substitutes for a while.
> The duration of that while depends on how quickly the build of this
> package is started by our continuous integration software, and how long
> it takes to complete the build.
>
> Granted, disabling parts of the test suite in an attempt to shorten it
> is really a technical fix to a social problem.
>
> Personally, I think that the SVN tests are non-essential (after all,
> we’re building Git here, we keep running the individual test suites of
> Git and Subversion, and git-svn interop seems like a thing that only
> upstream need to worry about), which is why I made this proposal.  But
> as it seems that the people who responded to this message rather lean in
> the other direction, let’s try to address the social problem instead:
>
> How can we change our workflow to make sure that for packages with long
> build/test times we can provide substitutes more quickly?  Currently,
> our policy for pushing changes to “staging” and “core-updates” is based
> on package counts.  I’m not suggesting that changes to Git be pushed to
> “staging”.
>
> What do you think of pushing some package updates only to feature
> branches that follow a certain naming convention (e.g. “_update-foo” for
> updating the “foo” package), which causes Cuirass to build them and
> merge the branch into “master” (semi-)automatically when the build is
> successful?
>
>
>
> I think this is a very reasonable approach. If this will be the way to go,
then we also need a way to select packages to which this applies, and find
a way to communicate this.

> (Obviously, any kind of automation has to be thought out carefully, but
> I’m sure we would be able to find a solution.)
>
> What do you think?
>
> --
> Ricardo
>
>
>

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