Re: Build failure tooling improvements

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Rob Whitlock <rwhitlock22%gmail.com@localhost> writes:

> I occasionally run into the issue that a program builds but crashes on
> startup. A suggestion would be to have some sort of smoke test that
> runs the program and checks for that sort of thing. That would
> probably be package-specific though, and would likely have overlap
> with any test target that might already be present.

It sounds like you want

  The "smoke-test" target is conceptually similar to test, but is
  intended to take very little CPU time and real time to run.
  Generally, it should run in less than half of the time it takes to
  build the package.  Ideally, it will verify that the program starts
  and does something right, but it will not attempt to run test suites.

but:

  - it's a lot of work to write these
  - I don't think upstreams are going to want to add these
  - it won't work with cross builds
  - it will be testing the binaries in the build tree, using the
    package's mechanisms to find the built (and not installed shlibs)