There is an automagic build-time dependency over valgrind when running the testsuite; I cannot tell you much about it but I see it running right now, and it takes _quite_ some time. Maybe it should be put as an USE flag or simply dropped out of testing; the memcheck log output is not something we should probably be caring about by default. Thanks, Diego
xapian has been without a maintainer for a while, so I looked at this (since I'm taking care of valgrind). I think the way to go is to just DEPEND on valgrind rather than drop it. The tests take 7 minutes on an 8 core (well 4 core x 2 hyperthreading) i7 2.67GHz and are useful. I don't understand why/how you would USE-depend on valgrind since its integrally part of some of the tests. I'll wait a will for some feedback and then just add valgrind to DEPENDS. Aside: xapian looks like a nice lib and should have a maintainer, but I don't know if I want to take on more.
No, valgrind has to go. Valgrind is *not* an acceptable reproducible test tool: - it won't work with new glibc versions causing false positives; - it won't work with code built with SSE4 or other new instruction sets. So please, DO NOT force valgrind, rather add an USE flag for it that is disabled by default.
I just filed a version bump for xapian (see bug 383001) which _Should_ fix this issue (i.e.,not run valgrind in tests). Please verify. thanks!
Once we stabilize 1.2.7 valgrind will be out of the picture and we'll close this bug.
1.2.8 is stable.
