Re: Unable to build "Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge" paper

[Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Wed, 01 Nov 2023 at 11:09, Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@reproducible-builds.org> wrote:

>> Please bear with me as I again belabor the same point without receiving
>> public support. Building packages should be separate from testing them.
>
> In general, I agree... sort of.
>
> I do see value in build-time tests preventing a build from
> succeeding... being a way to ensure that a broken build does not
> actually get distributed.
>
> You could completely separate out the tests, and set up some other
> mechanism to prevent broken things from getting distributed, but that is
> considerably more complicated.

I think the complication starts before. :-)

Well, hoping to not misunderstand something or miss a point.

Currently, the tests are one among many other phases of the build
system.  Therefore, this would need to be extracted as a separated
derivation.  Somehow, there is 3 derivations involved when building a
package: 

 + fetch source
 + run build system
 + graft (optionally)

And somehow you would like to split “run build system” (./configure &&
make && make check)) as two derivations:

 + run build (./configure && make)
 + test (make check)

If we are here, we could make all the phases as separated derivations.
A corollary is that a failure about one phases step would not require to
redo all the previous steps.

Well, if my understanding is correct, separating the tests would be a
piece of work, I guess. :-)

Cheers,
simon