On Mon, 22 Aug 2016, Sean Whitton wrote: > 1. flycheck tends to FTBFS because the test suite contains many tests > which encode expected output from ~30 command line tools. When one of > those tools sees a new upstream version which tweaks its output, the > test breaks.
Perhaps encoding the expected output (to the letter) is not a good idea, then. Assuming those are standard Unix tools, they usually follow some standard, which tells them how the output should be. A well designed test should be prepared to check any output which follow this standard, not the exact stream of bytes produced by a certain fixed version. > 2. The test suite also fails under certain autobuilder setups. In > particular, the reproducible builds team's automated builders fail with > mysterious permission errors. I think it is something to do with their > tmpfs setup -- though I use tmpfs with sbuild and can't reproduce the > error. We are working with computers, which are designed to do that we tell them to do. There are not really "mysterious errors", only errors which nobody has investigated yet. In particular, a build failure is usually one of two things: Either a bug in the program (even if it does not always happen), or a bug in the building software (I use sbuild, they use pbuilder). So, I would encourage you to contact them to see if there are any bugs in pbuilder (or their setup in general). Thanks.
