Make (install from source) python without running tests

Question

I compiling python from source tar. All works good, but tests running 2 hours and two times. How to bypass these tests?

0:16:20 [178/405] test_inspect
0:16:26 [1         


        

Answer 1

The configure option --enable-optimizations enables running test suites to generate data for profiling Python. The resulting python binary has better performance in executing python code. Improvements noted here

From configure help:
--enable-optimizations  Enable expensive optimizations (PGO, etc). Disabled by default.

From wikipedia

 profile-guided optimisation uses the results of profiling test runs of the instrumented program to optimize the final generated code.

In short, you should not skip tests when using --enable-optimizations as the data required for profiling is generated by running tests. You can run make -j8 build_all followed by make -j8 install to skip tests once(the tests would still run with install target), but that would defeat the purpose. You can instead drop the configure flag for better build times.