On Wed, 5 Jan 2011, Jaap Winius wrote:
Hi folks,
Compiling the Debian sources for the OpenLDAP packages can take over an hour on my relatively fast workstation. Much of that time seems to be spent running a slapd server with all kinds of test routines. Is that what's actually going on? Whatever, perhaps someone could explain.
Thanks,
Jaap
You'd have to check with the Debian guys if they include a "make test" in their routine. If they do, it would be the most likely cause of the behavior described. Presumably you're building multiple backends, and those multiple backends are being tested. i.e., there's not only 50-someodd tests to be run, but they are run once for each suitable and/or requested backend. This necessarily takes some time.
IMO this is a worthwhile package design decision considering the ratio of package build frequency :: package execution frequency. But if you find yourself building a lot, you can skip the step and use the binaries blind. (Of course, for really heavy development, I find myself just typing "make" interactively. Which does NOT imply test, so I have a binary ready-to-try in short order.)