Re: New GnomeGoal proposal: InstalledTests

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Fri, 2013-04-26 at 15:47 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:

> I don't see any reason why this couldn't be equally true for "make
> check": 

Because make check requires rebuilding the module just to run the tests.
I'm running the gjs test suite at the moment on the complete resulting
installed tree (that users will download) for *any* source change.
Obviously it's not strictly *necessary* to run the gjs test suite when
there's commits to xorg-xserver or gdm.  But it also doesn't hurt.

And it's really important to have the gjs tests run automatically (and
quickly) when glib changes for example.   I have plenty of CPU to go
around at the moment even on this one test machine; it spends probably
60% its time totally idle, waiting for git commits.  

Yes, if I was doing complete reverse dependency rebuilds, that could as
a consequence trigger a rerun of all tests, but full revdep rebuilds
would massively slow down the feedback cycle.  The point of this system
is to detect bad commits *quickly* (minutes, not hours or days), even at
some cost to "correctness".