Re: preparing for a new release

[Gavin Smith]

On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 09:45:44AM -0800, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Karl has made quite a few improvements, so I'm preparing to make a new
> release. But first, I wanted to make the tests pass reliably also when
> running them in parallel (the only way I run them, because otherwise,
> they take way too long). I run a command like this:
> 
> make check AM_TESTSUITE_MAKE="make -j$(( 2*$(nproc) + 1 ))"
> 
> That evoked a surprising number of test failures. Note that these are
> nondeterministic and depend on the amount of parallelism. All tests
> may pass consistently on a system with 2 cores, yet some will fail
> every time when nproc prints at least 6.
> 
> I've fixed a few of these failures, but here is still at least one
> that I have not fixed: t/txinfo-no-clutter. In this case, running it
> with no parallelism and by itself passes:
>   make -k check TESTS='t/txinfo-no-clutter'
> Yet running it with parallel make fails (I'm using make-4.3.90 built
> from git, in case it matters):
>   make -k check TESTS='t/txinfo-no-clutter' AM_TESTSUITE_MAKE="make
> -j$(( 2*$(nproc) + 1 ))"
> 
> Not sure I'll work more on this today, so sharing: The attached log
> shows that this fails when building that test's final "all" rule,
> often because a .dvi file could not be found:
> 
> ) localization,mv: cannot stat 'bar.dvi': No such file or directory
> 
> I've attached the four commits I'm about to push as well as that
> individual testsuite.log, in case someone wants to help accelerate the
> process.

I got the same with the recent version in git: ran OK with

make -k check TESTS='t/txinfo-no-clutter'

but broke with


make -k check TESTS='t/txinfo-no-clutter' AM_TESTSUITE_MAKE="make -j$(( 
2*$(nproc) + 1 ))"

My make version is GNU Make 4.1.  I'm attaching testsuite.log.

test-suite.log
Description: Text document