Re: 3.8.0-rc1 make check failures on Fedora rawhide

[Mike Miller]

On Wed, 11 Dec 2013 14:23:34 -0800, Rik wrote:
> The nicest would be to simply skip the test entirely, but I think it would
> be acceptable to have it unconditionally pass or fail (slight preference
> towards fail, because then people will at least look and triage their
> failures into ones that are important and ones, like this, which aren't. 
> Nobody pays attention to a test that passes and it would be giving false
> confidence that Octave's graphics would work.).  Incidentally, this is
> already the behavior for Octave.

I mostly agree with this. We report test failures but they are purely
informative, the make command does not report failure.

On the other hand, if DISPLAY does become more of a big deal for unit
tests with the GUI and more FLTK functionality (or future Qt plotting),
we could have special handling for something like

  %!testif HAVE_DISPLAY

Possibly even collect the number of tests skipped for this specific
reason at the end

  36 tests skipped because no graphical console available

Disclaimer: I readily admit that such special cases are a bad precedent
to set.

On a related note, I would like to be able to see which tests failed and
why directly in the build log on hydra or on distribution autobuild
logs, but not enough to try to do something about it yet. Anyone else
think this is a good idea?

-- 
mike