Re: valgrind-tests.m4

[Bruno Haible]

Simon Josefsson wrote:
> my patch invokes valgrind with -q so that it does not
> output anything, unless there are errors, of course

Oh, I see. Indeed.

But it spends a lot of time in "make check", and does not exploit the full
information that valgrind could provide. For a test, I ran "make check"
in gettext/gettext-tools/tests,
* With --enable-shared and libtool wrappers:
  - without valgrind:                                                 105 sec.
  - with valgrind -q for just the sh that runs the test:             1191 sec.
  - with valgrind -q for just the sh that runs the libtool wrappers: 6457 sec.
* Without libtool wrappers:
  - without valgrind:                                                  42 sec.
  - with valgrind -q for just the programs:                          2147 sec.

And it spends that much time for only a particular use of valgrind:
no checking for memory leaks.

Given this, that a test suite that was designed to take 10 minutes on an older
hardware (10 years ago) and 1 minute on nowadays hardware now takes an hour
with valgrind, I would certainly not enable valgrind by default in a tarball.
But I do agree with you that maintainers should run the tests with valgrind
regularly.

Bruno