(this isn't directed at any one person or group or any recent incident, this
has been bugging me for years)
I have one simple request. When you make a non-trivial change to an ebuild -
a patch, a version bump, anything that can effect the behaviour of the
package - please run the test suite. If it fails, fix it. Or restrict it.
Or even make it non-fatal if there's no other choice. If you can reproduce
failures outside of portage, report them upstream. Failures indicate either
a broken package or a broken test suite and either way it's in your best
interests to get them fixed.
Remember that for anyone running FEATURES=test a failure breaks the build*.
You wouldn't commit something that doesn't compile (hopefully :P), so why
is this any different? There is no point in even having test suites if
everyone just disables them in frustration because every third package fails.
I apologize for the rant, but when I do testing for gcc-porting I rely
heavily on tests to catch runtime issues. And every release cycle I end up
spending way too much time trying to figure out why a test is failing, only
to find that there's been an bug open about it for two years with no
activity.
* I know about test-fail-continue, but I've found that it just causes me
file fewer bug reports because they don't annoy me as much. ;)
--
fonts,by design, by neglect
gcc-porting, for a fact or just for effect
wxwidgets @ gentoo EFFD 380E 047A 4B51 D2BD C64F 8AA8 8346 F9A4 0662
