parallel tests broken on Debian stable

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

Thanks for catching this, Bremner.

On Fri 2019-05-10 07:45:18 -0300, David Bremner wrote:
> In a debian stretch neither gnu parallel nor moreutils parallel
> successfully completes the tests.

I have confirmed this misbehavior on debian stretch with moreutils
parallel.  on stretch (with gmime 3.0 from stretch-backports), the tests
complete successfully in serial, but with moreutils parallel installed
they consume the full 2 minutes and then time out, but they time out
without failing explicitly.

> But the real question is why the jobs don't complete within a 2 minute
> timeout.

i agree, this is a serious issue, though we should also ensure that
timed-out tests count as failures.

So there are three things to fix:

 a) when a timeout hits, the test suite should explicitly fail, even if
    no individual tests have failed.

 b) we should have a clearer sense of which tests completed and which
    did not

 c) we should avoid the timeout hanging :)


Looking at the output of "ps" during the hanging test suite, it appears
that parallel is getting blocked by running: T050, T060, T070, T080 (i'm
using a 4-core machine).

I've just sent two patches to the list that aim for part (a), and i'm
going to work on part (c) on stable now.  if someone else wants to
improve the test suite to handle (b) that would be great.

     --dkg
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