bug#56424: hydra.nixos coverage job times out

[Glenn Morris]

Package: emacs
Version: 29.0.50

Ref: https://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/gnu/emacs-trunk

The hydra.nixos "coverage" job, which is the one that runs "make check",
had been timing out for a month. If this has not been flagged before
now, it seems like a sign that this automated build isn't useful any
more and should be stopped.

The way to do that is probably to open an issue at
https://github.com/NixOS/hydra/issues

There is also https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/hydra-users ,
but I'm not sure it is used/monitored any more.

The start of the timeout cannot be pin-pointed, because the build was
broken for several days.

It last worked consistently around
https://hydra.nixos.org/eval/1764830

Then the build was broken for several days from:
https://hydra.nixos.org/eval/1764836

The build started working again in:
https://hydra.nixos.org/eval/1765592
but coverage was already timing out.

It has worked once or twice since then, but mostly timed out.

See https://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/gnu/emacs-trunk/evals?page=30
(at time of writing)

No-one has login access to this system. If you want to investigate this,
your options are:

1) Install Nix locally and try the "Reproduce locally" button from the
"Actions" menu on a job web page.

2) Make the check process more verbose, so you can see where it hangs.
The enevironment variable EMACS_HYDRA_CI is set in these builds.

3) Modify the hydra build recipe. To do this, get access to
https://savannah.nongnu.org/p/hydra-recipes in the usual way, and modify
the file emacs/release.nix.