Andy Tai <atai@atai.org> writes:

> Hi, I have a patch submission that builds fine (in the GNU Guix sense,
> that is, unit tests run and pass) locally but fails on Guix QA due to
> unit tests failing.
>
> I suspect that the failures are due to the build machine (or machines)
> as plain x86-64 PC (fine as build server(s)) does not have exotic
> hardware units like GPU that the package in question is meant to use.
>
> This may become more common as GPU and NPU applications become more popular.
>
> Curious how shall such cases be handled?  Maybe reviewers can build
> and run the patch to verify the patch works, so the Guix QA failure
> can be overridden?

I'm not sure we have great guidance here, but viewing this through the
reproducible builds lens, we want packages to build identically across a
diverse range of setups.

While tests might not affect the outputs, I think the same premise still
holds. The set of tests that are run should be the same regardless of
the machine used.

Have you got some specific examples where you're seeing failing unit
tests, only on headless servers?

Thanks,

Chris