[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#907905: garli: FTBFS randomly (failing tests)

[Andreas Tille]

Control: severity -1 normal
Control: tags -1 upstream
Control: forwarded -1 https://github.com/Ashod/garli/issues/1

Hi Santiago,

thanks for your QA effort.

On Mon, Sep 03, 2018 at 10:05:21PM +0000, Santiago Vila wrote:
> 
> That's how the build ends and not necessarily the relevant part, but
> I've put several build logs here:
> 
> https://people.debian.org/~sanvila/build-logs/garli/
> 
> I estimate that the failure rate might be around 10% so I leave the severity to you.
> 
> ...
>
> The tests seem to perform simulations based on random numbers, this is
> the perfect recipe to make the failure rate to be a number strictly
> greater than zero, which is a pity.
> 
> A simple fix would be to use a fixed random seed for those random numbers,
> that way at least the random numbers would always be the same.

I uploaded respecting this hint by setting randseed accordingly.
Interestingly some randomness is remaining since not every single build
results in the very same log output (but the diff is drastically smaller
and I think it reduces randomness to a level that the FTBFS issue is
solved.)

Since I think the test failures are an interesting issue for upstream
I opened an issue there

   https://github.com/Ashod/garli/issues/1

and kept the Debian bug open for further documentation.  However I took
the freedom to set the severity to normal.

Thanks again

       Andreas.

BTW, since I did further enhancements to the package by providing an MPI
build the package needs to pass new.  Please wait for version 2.1-3 before
doing new tests.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de