[Development] Need advise on acceptable timeouts for autotests

[Rex Dieter]

Marc Mutz wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> We repeatedly have the problem that timeouts that developers think are
> ample (because they exceed typical runtime by, say, two orders of
> magnitude) are found to be insufficient on the CI.
> 
> Latest example:
> http://testresults.qt.io/coin/integration/qt/qtbase/tasks/1489618366
> 
> The timeout to run update-mime-database was recently increased to 2mins.
> But that still does not seem to be enough. For a call that hardly takes a
> second to run on unloaded machines.

May be relevant:  Recent versions of update-mime-database do (imo needless) 
fsync writes, which can make it take up to 30-50 seconds on some systems.  
See also:
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70366

One can opt-out of that setting: 
PKGSYSTEM_ENABLE_FSYNC=0
which may be desirable for tests such as these.

-- Rex