This is a bit of a philosophical ramble. I just wondered how the developers feel about it.
I have noticed that there are often posts on this list and in the LQ LFS forum about check failures. They seem to cause a lot of anxiety. Usually the poster is told that the checks are there for the benefit of software developers rather than software users and that failures can be ignored. But in that case, why are the tests run at all, given that they often take a long time to execute? It seems wasteful to run expensive tests and then ignore the results. There are of course some packages which need to be thoroughly tested because they constitute the primary toolchain: glibc, binutils, gcc, and the gcc maths libraries. But I wonder if, for the rest, the sentence "To test the results, run make check" could be generally replaced by "If you want to test the results, run make check", emphasising that this is optional. There could be an extra paragraph at the beginning of Chapter 6, similar to the one in chapter 5, saying that it is not necessary to run the tests except for those packages which are explicitly flagged as requiring them, and that test failures elsewhere are not normally significant. Perhaps also, in chapter 5, the option to run make check should be taken out of the individual build instructions altogether to discourage users from wasting time and worry on tests that are unreliable anyway in that context. -- H Russman -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page Do not top post on this list. A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
