Bug#834682: mina2: FTBFS in testing (failing tests)

[tony mancill]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 07:35:58PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I tried building this package 20 times this morning.
> 
> It failed 19 times. The build logs are attached in a single tarball.
> 
> There is something which may help in this bug: there is a new upstream
> release of mina available (2.0.14).
> 
> So I'd like to propose that you or anybody in the team maintaining
> this package do this:
> 
> * Raise this to serious (where it belongs, it's a FTBFS bug).
> 
> * Disable completely the tests for this version (trivial patch attached).
>   The upload doing that would naturally close this bug.
> 
>   Disabling only the tests that fail would be also an option, but the tests
>   failing for me are not the same failing for Gregor, and it would not be
>   really productive or useful to determine which of the tests are ok and
>   which ones are not when we have a new upstream release available that may
>   have some or all of the failing tests already fixed.
> 
> * Try to upload mina version 2.0.14 for unstable (but this time without the patch)
>   to see if things improve with the new version. Hopefully this version does not
>   fail anymore, or maybe it fails for you and for me at the same time.
> 
> Would this plan be acceptable to you?
> 
> If yes, please go ahead and stop reading. Thanks a lot!
> 
> If not: there is a tag called stretch-ignore which is the right way to
> make a serious bug like this one not to be RC:
> 
> https://release.debian.org/stretch/rc_policy.txt
> 
> Please read the relevant paragraph: You would have to ask the Release
> Managers for permission first, you can't just downgrade a FTBFS bug on
> your own as a way to make it not RC.
> 
> But I really believe we can skip all that. Believe me, it is not my
> intention or desire to see this package autoremoved from Debian or
> anything like that, everything I ask is that it builds ok, and that's
> very easy to achieve with the attached path.
> 
> Thanks.

Hi Santiago,

Ugh - thank you for putting so much effort into this and for providing
logs.  I have tried to get the build to fail for me locally and can't,
which is also frustrating.  However, I feel like we have an established
precedent for disabling non-deterministic test suites, since flaky tests
can be worse than no tests at all, so I am applying your patch and
preparing an upload.

We can always enable tests down the road, as you suggest, perhaps with
the upload of the next upstream version.  

Cheers,
tony
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