Hi Mike, Mike Gerwitz <[email protected]> skribis:
> Is there a way (without screwing anything up) to skip tests during a > build? I understand that this is generally unwise---I don't want to > debate those merits. The short answer is “no”. The Boolean that determines whether tests are run is an “input” of the build process, and thus it contributes to that /gnu/store hash. Changing it leads to a different hash. I think it’s a feature, though. :-) > My immediate problem is that I'm on a dinky little ARM C201 Chromebook > and any sort of building is quite time-consuming, and often > prohibitively so: I can deal with the compilation times, but the tests > are simply too much; I don't have time to wait potentially hours for > software to build if they aren't available from hydra. GnuTLS is one > particularly intense dependency test-wise, for example. And then if a > test fails for whatever reason, I'm completely out of luck. I'd rather > install and then run tests later at my leisure, accepting the risks. > > But I don't know if any test output is taken into account in any Guix > hashes. > > There are a few situations where I've had no choice but to fall back to > installing the respective Debian package(s). But I've been very > impressed with how many ARM packages _are_ available from hydra---many > more than I had expected! The intent is to have as much as possible available as substitutes. However, while this works well for x86_64, the other platforms are not in as good a state. Part of it is due to the fact that they have fewer build machines¹ so they tend to lag behind. The second problem is that they have fewer users; developers don’t always notice when something breaks there and cannot fix issues easily if they don’t have access to the hardware. So I think it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Reporting the problems that you have on ARM (test suite failures, build failures, etc.) can help raise awareness and get people to fix things more quickly. Thanks, Ludo’. ¹ See the list at <https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/donate/>.
