parallel tests broken on Debian stable

[Tomi Ollila]

On Mon, May 20 2019, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:

> 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.

Simplest would be that after ./notmuch-test --debug exits, test-results/
would still exist :D

>
>      --dkg

Tomi