Bug#848859: FTBFS randomly (failing tests)

[Thibaut Paumard]

Le 04/01/2017 à 19:58, Anton Gladky a écrit :
> 2017-01-04 13:26 GMT+01:00 Santiago Vila <sanvila at unex.es>:
>> No matter how much glitch-free is the autobuilder you use to build the
>> above package, it will fail to build 1 every 147 times on average,
>> mathematically, because the test is wrongly designed.
> 
> That is not always true. If you look in many tests from numerical
> simulation packages, there is usually a "threshold" for test result
> which should not be exceeded. And the test result varies in
> the limits, which are set by upstream authors. This result
> can be different even on the same machine, running the simulation
> several time. And it is normal.
> 
> The "fix" for such cases is the increasing of the threshold or disabling
> the test completely. Because you can do nothing with it due to the
> nature of numerical simulations.

I addition a build-time test is made to detect potential bugs, which may
themselves be of low severity. What makes the bug RC is that the test
causes FTBFS. Once such a bug has been identified, I tend to fill a bug
with appropriate severity against my own package and disable the test
until the real, low to normal severity bug is fixed.

>> Really, we need more people doing QA, and not stop doing it "because
>> we are near the freeze".
> 
> If you are maintaining the package several years, fixing most of its
> bugs, hoping to see it in release and trying to escape major changes
> several months before the freeze.. Sure, it will actively be defended
> from maintainers if some pseudo-reasons for its removal appear just
> before the freeze. This fact has to be considered as well.

I guess that's a case for a stretch-ignore tag. TBD with the release
team. Regards, Thibaut.

Regards, Thibaut.