Improving the situation around check, xcheck and developer testing.

[Andreas K. Huettel]

> The xcheck target is unique to glibc, and has the following deficiencies:
> 
>  * Not documented in the GNU Coding Standards or Maintainers Guide.
> 
>  * Not documented anywhere the glibc manual.
> 
>  * Individual tests have varying critical requirements that are not documented
>    except here:
>    https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Testing/Tests

So I had a quick look at what is documented there, and it looks utterly harmless
compared to what I'm used from packaging Perl modules.

Suggestion from the Perl world [1], 
* introduce a switch that makes tests requiring network access unsupported
* flip it on by default
* move the tests to "check".

[1] https://metacpan.org/pod/Test::RequiresInternet

> Let me sketch a suggestion for us to discuss:
> 
>  * Add a quickcheck target for developers, put it in the manual in install.texi
> 
>    - The quickcheck target runs ALL the tests but sets SCALE_CHECK=1 env var,
>      valid values are 1-100.
> 
>  * Default quickcheck and check to be the same.
> 
>    - By default today quickcheck and check would be the same but we could
>      change that.
> 
>  * Default xcheck to run with SCALE_CHECK=100 env var.
> 
>  * Add your xcheck test to check *and* xcheck.
> 
>    - Tune the test to run as short as possible with SCALE_CHECK=1, and as long
>      as required with SCALE_CHECK=100.

 - Tests that *always* need large resources / time / cannot be scaled are skipped
   for SCALE_CHECK=1  (or scale with SCALE_CHECK-1 :o)




-- 
Andreas K. Hüttel
dilfridge@gentoo.org
Gentoo Linux developer
(council, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)
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