On Thu, 11 Dec 2025 at 17:17:22 +0100, Paul Gevers wrote:
autopkgtest already sets several environment variables during the
build, so we're considering adding one that's specific for either
autopkgtest, or ci in general. "CI" comes to mind.
For what it's worth, Gitlab CI and Github Actions both set CI=true as
one of their predefined environment variables, so if autopkgtest (and
ideally sadt) did the same, it would be straightforward to do whatever
"while running under CI" in a somewhat generic way.
The existence of AUTOPKGTEST_TMP in the environment is probably as good
a way as any to detect "we are under an autopkgtest-compatible runner"
more specifically than that. This is already available, and has been
since 2016. (sadt also sets this.)
Neither of those provide a way to tell the difference between "built as
a side-effect of autopkgtest" and "built for some other reason" for
test-cases that have the needs-build restriction. Does an autopkgtest
build-profile make sense for that? (autopkgtest already does set nocheck
and noudeb unconditionally, and cross if appropriate.)
Matthias' original use-case was wanting to disable the non-essential
parts of a binutils build (such as multilib) during autopkgtest. This
could be done either via a build-profile, or by checking for
AUTOPKGTEST_TMP in the environment. A build-profile would be necessary
if there was a desire to disable some build-dependencies, though.
smcv
