On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 04:46:20PM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Ansgar Burchardt [2013-08-22 9:24 +0200]:
> > Depends: @, ${source:Build-Depends}
> >
> > This would be useful for Perl modules where the test suite is already run at
> > build time. Otherwise one would have to maintain another copy of those
> > dependencies: there are alread build, test and runtime dependencies in
> > Build-Depends, runtime dependencies in Depends. Having to maintain another
> > list
> > of test-only dependencies in d/tests/control is not nice.
>
> I'm not against providing this, but NB that this should be treated
> with some care: One important point of autopkgtest ist to verify
> correct packaging, which includes that your package's dependencies are
> correct. If you specify lots of extra dependencies which aren't
> directly related to running tests, it's more likely to paper over
> actually missing binary dependencies.Right, I second this worry. And I wonder if we couldn't have better support for it at a different level. All in all, the need of the suggested feature seems to be justified by the desire to avoid duplication of information which is already written elsewhere (namely: in a *subset* of Build-Dependencies). Can't we, say, build something more general on top of, say, substvars to better support this need? Another related worry is that of avoiding duplication of the places where we run various kinds of test suites. What is great about autopkgtest is that it allows to easily run "as installed" test suites that were very hard to run at build time. But OTOH build-time test suites are very easy to run, well, at build time. Of course there is nothing worry with running build-time test suites *again* via autopkgtest, but it does smell of bad design. Or are we hinting here at the fact that it would be better (in an ideal world we're only starting to scratch :)) to run *all* test suites via autopkgtest, therefore relieving the buildds of the need of running them? An obvious problem with that idea is that we will probably never have autopkgtest runners for all the architectures for which we have buildds... Thoughts? Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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