gprofng not quite ready for prime time?

[Jose E. Marchesi]

> On 09.08.2022 20:17, Ruud van der Pas wrote:
>>> Initially I merely noticed version.texi trying to be created in the
>>> source tree, which of course won't work if that one is read-only.
>> 
>> This is oversight. I will create a bugzilla bug report and address this
>> right away.
>
> Thanks.
>
>>> But then I further noticed that the testsuite fails to build and/or
>>> run various things, first and foremost because of (but not
>>> necessarily limited to) Java not being available.
>> 
>> This work was done by Vladimir. He is currently away, but we will look
>> into this no later than this week.
>> 
>>> Despite (or maybe
>>> as a result of) this the running of the (mostly failing) testsuite
>>> took a non-negligible amount of time for the just 5 tests (on
>>> x86-64).
>> 
>> This is in the nature of the beast. As Luis already mentioned, we run
>> the tests in a fixed amount of time. We do so to get enough samples to
>> verify the functionality.
>> 
>> We are definitely interested in addressing this if it is considered to
>> take too much time. For example, make the fixed time a user tunable, with
>> a certain default, or alternatively provide feedback on the expected
>> duration of the test(s) to the builder. Any other suggestion is welcome!
>
> Earlier this year (iirc) some overly long lasting gas tests have been
> disabled / altered. None of those took minutes. So I'm inclined to say
> that anything which takes longer than a couple of seconds should be
> off by default. Of course the threshold lowers as more tests are added,
> unless a way is found to parallelize their running.

I think this is a sensible approach.

We could have an additional check-expensive (or similar) target to run
the full testsuite.