bug#13832: Tests fail because make runs with more than one jobs

[Joshua C.]

In the last couple of days I encountered a number of different tests
that reported a failure with ‘make check’. However in order to save
some time I ran ‘make –j4 check’ and this saved me about 75% of the
check time (~16min compared to ~62min for ‘make –j1 check’). The
reportedly failed tests passed without errors when tested with ‘make
–j1 check’. This makes me believe that ‘make’ doesn’t like to be run
as a server.

My proposition is: if a test fails for some reason, can we
automatically re-run it with passing ‘-j1’ to make? If it still fails
then count the result as a failure, if not – as a success. Can someone
take a look at it tries to implement it? I’m not that good at
experimenting with make-targets.

Tested with:

automake: git a5ed87e7944deaea33914230e3d67ff08eb18382
autoconf: git 9e087dd343b67ac58a7f54e08335ac62fc33ed53
make: git 4baf9ab4564447355b5748d1375959e817771d17

Failing tests with ‘make –j4 check’ (these pass fine with ‘make –j1 check’)

t/objc-megademo.sh
t/ar-lib4.sh


--joshua