[Nix-dev] Re: nixos update and running "make check" on autoconf

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

"Merijn de Jonge"
<merijn.de.jonge at gmail.com> writes:

> I'm just running "nixos-checkout; nixos-rebuild switch" and discover that
> part of the update consists of running "make check" on automake.
> This takes so much time... for such a small utility...

(I'm the one who added `doCheck = true' for Automake, as well as
`test-broken-make.patch'.)

Running "make check" allows us to make sure our packages work as
expected by their upstream maintainers, which is very important IMO.
Most (if not all) large free software distributions run *each* package's
test suite.

Yes, it takes time to run the test suite, but again, the build farm
should do it on our behalf, especially for "core" packages like this
one.  Thus, I'm in favor of paying attention to test suite runs for the
packages I care about.

Thanks,
Ludovic.