BIND 10 #3243: [kean] The serial unit tests execution is not possible for automake 1.13 and later

[BIND 10 Development]

#3243: [kean] The serial unit tests execution is not possible for automake 1.13
and later
-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
            Reporter:  marcin        |                        Owner:  kean
                Type:  enhancement   |                       Status:
            Priority:  medium        |  reviewing
           Component:  build system  |                    Milestone:
            Keywords:                |  Sprint-20131015
           Sensitive:  0             |                   Resolution:
         Sub-Project:  Core          |                 CVSS Scoring:
Estimated Difficulty:  0             |              Defect Severity:  N/A
         Total Hours:  0             |  Feature Depending on Ticket:
                                     |          Add Hours to Ticket:  0
                                     |                    Internal?:  0
-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Changes (by muks):

 * owner:  muks => kean
 * status:  assigned => reviewing


Comment:

 Hi Kean

 * Fedora 19 introduced automake with the new parallel harness feature
   about 6 months ago. All these years in BIND 10 development, tests
   have been run serially on developers' workstations, and are still run
   serially on builders on various platforms. The parallel harness
   feature is still not available on many platforms. Serial runs is the
   status quo.

 * There are very few directories where there are more than 1 test program
   to be run. So using the parallel harness would not provide any
   significant benefit at all:

 With serial harness and `make check`:
 {{{
 real  4m13.827s
 user  1m4.766s
 sys   0m4.632s
 }}}
 With parallel harness and `make -j8 check`:
 {{{
 real 4m8.498s
 user 1m11.212s
 sys  0m5.464s
 }}}

 Note that it is still possible to run `make -j8 check` with the serial
 harness. You'd get intermixed output where there are multiple test
 programs in the same directory.

 * Our unittests have not been written thinking that they would be run in
   parallel with other unittests. We share the same resources (such as
   databases) in many test programs. Concurrency might cause problems.

 Taking into account all of the above, I feel what's in `master` is
 correct.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://bind10.isc.org/ticket/3243#comment:14>
BIND 10 Development <http://bind10.isc.org>
BIND 10 Development