Subject: [alpine-devel] Seven and the terrible tests

From: "A. Wilcox" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2018 18:35:34 -0600

Hi there (xpost to both Adélie and Alpine dev lists),

There are seven packages that we (Adélie) ship with tests enabled.  We
do not know if Alpine would be able to use them, however, due to some
really bizarre problems we've encountered:

* main/attr

The test suite's Perl uses an outdated form of regular expression that
cause modern Perl to crash.  There are also assumptions about the libc
that do not hold in musl.  For this reason, we have two very large
patches to make the tests pass.  I am not sure if these are acceptable.

* main/cmake

The test suite was disabled on 21 September with a commit log message
"disable testsuite, blocking builders on multiple archs".  We haven't
had any issues with it on x86, x86_64, ppc, or ppc64.  Are there any
logs about what happened?  I would be willing to dig in.

* main/kyua

The test suite requires the builders to have a sysctl set:

kernel.core_pattern = core.%p

Otherwise, the test fails because 'core' is overwritten during the test
of handling core dumps.

* main/openldap

The test suite takes about two hours on our builders.  The fastest was
ppc64, 1h48m; next was x86_64, 2h3m; next was ppc at 2h4m; last was x86
at 2h41m.

It does pass.

* main/parted

We ported the test suite to Python 3, rewriting large parts of it in the
process.  We have not started a conversation upstream to determine if
this will can be merged or not.

* main/tzdata

The tzdata package needs 'sp', a SGML validator from the mid 90s.  I
spent a full day making it compile with a modern compiler.  Since it
needs the w3.org DTDs as well, I had to override www.w3.org in
/etc/hosts; they throttle requests to take 5 minutes due to lots of
spurious bot traffic trying to download the DTD files.

* main/zsh

The comment on Alpine's side is that "As of 5.4.2 - 3 tests fails".  We
have four tests failing, and we work around that by disabling them:

+       # Does not work with musl due to UTF-8
+       rm "$builddir"/Test/A03quoting.ztst
+       # Does not work with musl due to locale
+       rm "$builddir"/Test/B03print.ztst
+       # Not guaranteed to work portably (requires atime)
+       rm "$builddir"/Test/C02cond.ztst
+       # PowerPC-specific failure
+       rm "$builddir"/Test/V09datetime.ztst
        make test

We will maintain our own copies of the packages that have test suites
that Alpine is not willing to merge.

Best,
--arw

-- 
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
http://adelielinux.org