[DRE-maint] Bug#923986: ruby-pygments.rb: FTBFS randomly (failing tests)

[Santiago Vila]

severity 923986 serious
tags 923986 + patch
thanks

Hi. I finally found the reason for this build failure.

This is from the README.md:

  By default pygments.rb will timeout calls to pygments that take over 8
  seconds. You can change this by setting the environmental variable
  MENTOS_TIMEOUT to a different positive integer value.

This is defined in line 257 in lib/pygments/popen.rb:

  timeout_time = Integer(ENV["MENTOS_TIMEOUT"]) rescue 8

Based on the above, this is what makes the build failure to be fully
reproducible for me:

export MENTOS_TIMEOUT=1
dpkg-buildpackage

(I'm going to give Sergio access to a system where the above works,
just in case his computer is very fast).

Now, we can consider such low value (8) as a bug in itself, or we
could just concentrate on the build failure.

At the very minimum, and in my opinion, we should at least make the
package to build ok for everybody, not just those having a "fast
computer" (whatever that means). The end user must be able to modify
and then rebuild the package without having to jump through hoops.

I'm not talking about building on "very old computers" here, the
failure happens on reproducible-builds.org, which is already a bad
sign, and also on systems which are still in the VPS market right now
(like the Scaleway instances).

Proposed patch below.

Thanks.

--- a/debian/rules
+++ b/debian/rules
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
 #!/usr/bin/make -f
 
 export GEM2DEB_TEST_RUNNER = --check-dependencies
+export MENTOS_TIMEOUT = 60
 
 %:
 	dh $@ --buildsystem=ruby --with ruby