Hi again,
As I've been looking more closely at the CI suite for the Jenkins
transition, I've noticed that our Elixir test cases are actually the
most likely to fail. In 6 consecutive CI runs, 5 runs failed due to
failures in the Elixir suite. (The 6th failed due to a JS test failure.)
We started the Elixir effort to retire the JS suite. We reached a
decision some months ago to put it into `make check` so that people
would pay attention to its output, and work to fix those tests,
accelerating our chances to get rid of the JS suite.
Unfortunately, that's not materialised. Our Elixir test porters seem to
have stopped their work for a while now, and no one is systematically
addressing the failures in that suite. I've also heard other developers
mention (via IRC) that some of the test cases hold invalid assumptions
about how CouchDB works, especially with the Erlang-based clustering
code. It sounds to me like the effort needs a full code review.
With 3.0 around the corner, I want people to be able to trust the output
of `make check` when downloading the tarball. If there is no objection,
when I merge the Erlang version / CI changes on Monday, I will also
comment out the call to `make elixir` as part of make check.
When the Elixir porting team is more confident in the reliability and
completeness of their work, and we can successfully retire the JS suite,
we can reconsider.
-Joan "really wanting to see green, but only seeing red" Touzet
