Bug#827222: diffoscope: Support a timeout on the individual commands invoked by diffoscope

[Chris Lamb]

tags 827222 + wontfix
thanks

Hi Ed,

> diffoscope: Support a timeout on the individual commands invoked
> by diffoscope

Firstly, thanks for the report. I can certainly understand that it can
be frustrating when diffoscope times out. :/

However, having an individual timeout on the invoked commands means
that the generated reports will sometimes contain the extra diff data
and sometimes not.

This non-determinism is not a big problem from a pure reproducibility point
of view, but IMHO developer tools should contain as little "magic" as possible
and — above all — should produce entirely consistent output. For example. I can
imagine it being even more frustrating to be grepping for a particular string
in the output for it to sometimes appear and sometimes not depending on CPU
load, wasting precious time and cognitive load.

Thus, I am marking this as wontfix.

(If it helps, I notice that you reported this against diffoscope 54. In the
meantime, we have improved the performance of diffoscope quite considerably
so these timeouts are far less common.)


Regards,

-- 
      ,''`.
     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      lamby at debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
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