[PPL-devel] Bug#517659: ppl - FTBFS: Missuse of buildd resources

[Michael Tautschnig]

Hi Bastian,

> Bastian Blank wrote:
>> Package: ppl
>> Version: 0.10-4
>> Severity: serious
>>

As I hate playing with severities: I'd ask you to reconsider the severity after
reading those mails, I'd prefer not to change it myself to avoid any kind of
ping-pong.

>> The build of ppl needs 7 CPU-hours on a fast machine, including a long
>> documentation run.
>
> This is probably due to `make check', which is something you can disable
> if you are prepared to accept the risk of miscompilation of the library
> (something that has just happened on Debian/Alpha).
>
> You should take into account that we use the PPL to validate
> mission-critical software.  Consequently, our `make check' is very
> thorough.  For PPL 0.11 we will probably add a `make quick-check'
> feature, but we will certainly not use it ourselves (because we know
> no single test in `make check' is truly superfluous).
>

Our debian/rules understands the nocheck build option, so there is already a
Debian-standard way of disabling that, but I have no idead whether buildd's
software supports that. I'd also ask Bastian to acknowledge the importance of
the suite as ppl is a (future) dependency of gcc, which is of uttermost
importance to other package builds.

In the past we had ignored problems during make check which caused a big-endian
problem to slip through that would have been spotting by the test suite. As
such, the test suite really seems useful, especially with Debian's broad range
of platforms.

> Concerning the documentation, we use Doxygen to build the library's
> documentation.  I don't know which subset of the available manuals
> the Debian package builds.  In the past it was building also the
> developer's reference manual, something we advised against.  Moreover,
> the instantiation-independent documentation is shipped with the
> library and there is no need to rebuild it.
>

We only build the user-docs nowadays, and that actually wouldn't be necessary if
Debian's build system did what the policy says: There is no need to re-build the
architecture independent stuff on each and every host, but the buildd software
does not yet properly use the build-arch target. If it did, we could get rid of
all the dependencies (the TeX stuff, doxygen and some others) that needn't get
installed and would spare the documentation building time. Bastian, if there is
some other nice way to work around the build-arch problem, please let me know.

> Anyway, if it really takes 7 hours perhaps there is some other problem
> or I would not call the machine "a fast machine".  Configuring the PPL
> with --enable-interfaces"c c++" (which is what I believe Debian does)
> `make check' takes less than 3 hours on our main server (`make -j 8 check'
> takes less than 34 minutes).
>

Maybe the disks are a little slower and some other overhead -> I think twice
your build time does not immediately mean that there is a problem, unless your
main server is something you consider slow already.

[...]

Bastian, at the moment I don't see any other option than kindly asking you to
accept the situation. I'll do my best to keep the frequency of uploads as low as
possible such as not to block the buildds for too long. If you see any option
for improvements I'm of course open to integrate them with the build rules of
the ppl package.

Thanks,
Michael

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