Re: make check(s) pre-release problems

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2022-10-05 at 05:27 +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> > So what the heck?[...] >These always worked before. But now, Jim
> > gets hundreds of failures with the first
> 
> Make was in the news recently, maybe that's the component to
> switch out for an earlier version?
> 
> 7ad2593b Support implementing the jobserver using named pipes

What version of GNU make are you using?  There has been no new release
of GNU make (yet).  If you're running a prerelease version of GNU make,
you might consider trying it with the last official release (4.3) to
see if it helps.

Certainly if something is failing with the GNU make prerelease that
would be good to know, however.

Re: make check(s) pre-release problems

[Karl Berry]

What version of GNU make are you using?

I've been using make 4.3 since its release in 2020. No changes, no
prereleases.  I'm afraid the problem, whatever it is, is not that simple :(.

What troubles me most is that there's no obvious way to debug any test
failure involving parallelism, since they go away with serial execution.
Any ideas about how to determine what is going wrong in the parallel
make?  Any way to make parallel failures more reproducible?

Right now, all I know is "some random test(s) fail(s)". Not helpful. The
test logs show the set -x execution of the test, so the actual command
that fails can be seen.  I have keep_testdirs=yes, of course, but then
running the command by hand in the shell after the failure often does
not reproduce the problem.

Something else is going on, but my imagination about what that might be
has failed so far :(.  Argh.  --thanks, karl.