On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 01:27:26PM +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote: > Colin Watson <cjwat...@ubuntu.com> writes: > > Running tests when cross-compiling doesn't work > > Is that something that should be supported by debian packages?
There are a number of different people trying to do cross-building work based on Debian. Emdebian is one, of course, and the project I'm working on (a relative latecomer) is another. It certainly isn't yet a policy requirement, and isn't likely to be for a while, but that's at least in part simply because a lot of packages currently fail to cross-build. In Debian, policy tends to follow working implementation rather than the other way round, so the first step in developing policy around this has to be ad-hoc efforts to get the number of working packages up a bit. Simple packages that just use autotools in the most usual way and don't do any fancy packaging stuff do tend to work fine, and there've been a lot of cross-build patches accepted already, so we're not entirely fighting against the wind. > I believe many packages will have the some problem, so potentially > there is a better way to deal with it than patching each and every > package. I have thought a bit about whether it makes sense to do this in central scripts (CDBS, dh_auto_test, etc.). I'm on the fence about that. On the one hand, it would certainly be convenient not to need to change more packages than necessary. On the other, it would be incorrect to state across the board that tests can never be run when cross-compiling; this is true when the tests involve running a host architecture binary, but I can imagine e.g. tests that just made sure that data files were sane, or that kind of thing. Emdebian's automation sets DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck to avoid running into this. I think, to be honest, that I may do the same in my automation simply because it'll be quicker, but my gut feel is that it's more technically sound for packages to declare whether their tests involve running host-architecture binaries or not. > Also, it seems to me that the patch isn't generally the right thing, > there are plenty of cross-compilation targets where you _can_ run the > binary on the host architecture (i686 on amd64, windows via wine, etc). While this is true, I don't think many people are doing this kind of thing with Debian packages at the moment. That may become more of an issue with the second phase of multiarch support in Debian, once it's feasible to hook things up so that e.g. ARM binaries are just magically run using qemu; but when that happens the cross-building landscape is going to change radically anyway, so I'm not really attempting to think about that yet. Thanks, -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@ubuntu.com] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
