[bug #15719] Make jobserver feature not supported on WINDOWS32 platforms

[greg keranen]

Follow-up Comment #6, bug #15719 (project make):

Agent Zhang wrote:
>I'm guessing it's probably not a bug in GNU make, but a "bug" in the test
suit itself. AFAIK, there's no easy way to overcome this problem, hence it's
mostly the user's responsibility not to run the test suit either on very slow
machines or when the system load is pretty high. 

It don't think it is a problem with the test suite: it is a problem with make
running on the W32 platform.

It is always a temptation to 'tweak' a test until the software passes - but
this is a very dangerous thing to do! It may give the developers  a sigh of
relief but it misleads the hapless user into trusting that results are
assured when they are, in fact not.

It is better to create tests that TRY TO FAIL, rather than those which try to
succeed.

In the case of this bug, I have a very fast machine (AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+)
and it is pretty easy for me to make the test fail, at least 20% of the
time.

I think the best solution, if this bug CANNOT be fixed (and I would wager it
cannot) is to reduce the sleep time of the test to INCREASE likelihood of
failure.

If the bug cannot be truly fixed, under any amount of load - the best
solution would be to completely disable the -j feature when running on W32
platform so a user never gets 'surprised' when something fails under load,
etc.

Either a feature should work RELIABLY, or not at all, in my opinion.

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