Re: shortening the git test suite

[Chris Marusich]

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> 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.

I'm in favor of disabling tests if they fail for reasons other than bugs
in the program and there isn't an easy fix (e.g., they require root
privileges, or they fail due to randomness in the tests), but disabling
them simply because they take a "long" time doesn't seem like a great
reason, to me.  I'm sympathetic, since I don't like waiting around,
either, but substitutes should be sufficient for those who need faster
builds.

-- 
Chris

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