Hazel Russman wrote:
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.
The tests are optional for LFS users. We do say mandatory in for the tool
chain, but we also document known failures.
The tests provide a level of comfort to new builders that the build was
done properly. Experienced builders often skip the tests. Indeed, jhalfs
has an option to do just that.
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.
As you note, we do mention the issues above in the last section of Chapter
4. If users choose to not read it or ignore it, then they will learn a
lesson in reading comprehension.
-- Bruce
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