Subject: Re: bug#35521: Mariadb test suite failures on x86_64-linux

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2019 22:18:44 +0200

Hi Mark,

Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Marius Bakke <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> Chris Marusich <[email-masked]> writes:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I've been encountering this failure off and on for a few weeks now, and
>>> I'd like to help fix it.  In short, it seems like non-deterministic test
>>> failures, to me.  I think we should gather data and report the issue
>>> upstream, and maybe disable the offending tests in the meantime.
>>
>> I agree.  I notice many of these failing tests are for the TokuDB
>> backend, which I doubt anyone is using in Guix anyway.
>>
>> Here is a patch that disables all tests mentioned in this report.  I
>> would like to push it to core-updates.  Are there others?
>
> I'm concerned by how frequently and casually we simply disable failing
> tests.  What is the utility of running test suites at all, if this is
> how we respond?

I don’t think anyone is happy with that.  The alternative seems to be:
keeping an older version that perhaps didn’t have these problems but may
have known bugs and security issues, or keeping a package that fails to
build for a possibly long time.

I think disabling specific tests is the least bad of these options.  In
this case, we know that the offending tests relate to a specific
backend, and one can at least assume that potential issues are in that
area.  So I do think that this is an appropriate response.

Of course, in any such case, we should report the issue upstream, even
if we all too well know that non-deterministic test failures are hard to
address…

Ludo’.