With Zack's latest Python fixes, I was hoping to move towards an Automake release, but I find myself stymied by apparently random and unreproducible test failures. I haven't exhausted every conceivable avenue yet, but I thought I would write in hopes that others (Zack, past Automake developers, anyone else ...) could give it a try, and/or have some insights.
For me, running a parallel make check (with or without parallelizing the "internal" makes), or make distcheck, fails some tests, e.g., nodef, nodef2, testsuite-summary-reference-log. The exact tests that fail changes from run to run. Running the tests on their own succeeds. Ok, so it's something in the parallelism. But why? And how to debug? Nothing has changed in the tests. Nothing has changed in the automake infrastructure. Everything worked for me a few weeks ago. Furthermore, Jim ran make check with much more parallelism than my machine can muster, and everything succeeded for him. That was with: make check TESTSUITEFLAGS=-j20 So what the heck? Perhaps easier to debug: there are two targets to be run before making a release, check-no-trailing-backslash-in-recipes and check-cc-no-c-o, to try to ensure no reversion wrt these features. A special shell and compiler are configured, respectively (shell scripts that check the behavior). These always worked before. But now, Jim gets hundreds of failures with the first (didn't have time to try the second). I get a couple, with both, instead of hundreds. Again the failing tests vary. In this case, they fail for me even without parallelism. So what the heck x 2? Any ideas, directions, fixes, greatly appreciated. --thanks, karl.