Coverage decreased (-2.03%) to 82.1% when pulling f6a69a6 on KAction:no-regex into 80052e5 on stedolan:master.

I understand the tests fail without regex support, but I'm against skipping the manual test entirely. This is written in README.md as note that jq's tests require regexp support to pass. Closing as unacceptable patch, but if you have any other solution, please comment below.

Just to be sure I understand correctly, with my distribution maintainer hat on -- if I am building jq version without regex support, I am not supposed to run tests, correct?

Depends on what you want to achieve. I found Homebrew recipe checks a minimal test case that the executable can be invoked (ref). This allows end users to install the command even when some bugs or flakiness were introduced to bundled test cases. But if you still want to run the entire tests, we need a better solution than skipping man.test entirely. Maybe splitting the man.test into two, or improving --run-tests to skip regex tests if not available.

Then I am lost. This pull request is supposed doing exactly that -- improving tests so regex tests are skipped when regex is not built.

I created a PR #2644 to the solution improving --run-tests to skip regex tests if not available.