Following a discussion in the #GHC matrix channel, I’m curious to know what the community thinks about this.
Would you run GHCs testsuite (maybe part of it) on either your own system or the system where you compile your production binaries?
What sparked the discussion is that ghcup test ghc already exists, but is largely defunct due to the GHC test bindists having several issues.
As a user of FreeBSD to host my Haskell web applications, I’d definitely be interested.
What does “running GHCs testsuite” mean in this case?
Running a testsuite using the GHC executable I’m using to check the executable is working correctly?
Or do you mean running a testsuite that would otherwise be run by GHC’s CI to help GHC development?
I have not read the matrix channel discussion, so I have zero context.
Yes… they are currently the same thing, more or less. The test bindist is provided here: https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.10.1/ghc-9.10.1-testsuite.tar.xz
So is the question’s underlying goal:
Because my answer to the former would be “maybe”, and to the latter “no”.
I don’t really want to put forward my own goals and ideas, but hear those of the community. At one point I might write a HF tech proposal or something similar about it.
I am mostly making use of nix built ghc binaries for production, and I would want them to be tested at least when they got built. If I am using a tested binary across many systems, then testing on each system is not important. (usually all are nixos systems)
And I think that ghc’s testsuite is not being run by nix build process. But the nix based dev environment does run the tests of all the dependencies/libraries. So this has been the source of confidence in the ghc binary, but running ghc’s testsuite would be nicer.
