"Bernhard R. Link" <brl...@debian.org> writes: > * Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> [130504 00:32]:
>> The way to ensure that builds in non-clean environments work properly >> is to devise a method for testing them, and to do those tests on a >> regular basis and turn test failures into bugs. > Noone is speaking about non-clean environments, but only about > non-minimal, non-artifical ones. That's what I mean by "non-clean." >> Trying to get at this testing indirectly by putting conditions on >> initial archive uploads doesn't really accomplish the goal. It's a >> very random and scattershot way of testing that already doesn't work >> for any of us who use pbuilder and cowbuilder already. > That's why I think maintainers should not only build in pbuilders and > cowbuilders, but give their packages some actual testing. We can think maintainers "should" do a lot of things. The reality of software development is that if you don't test it, it doesn't happen. We can ask every maintainer to set up a test procedure for this, and some of them even will. But many of them won't. If we want to support this feature across the project, and I agree that I would like us to, then we need to test it across the project and turn the failures into bugs, rejects, or some other sort of feedback. This is similar to the argument for continuous integration systems. Yes, the benefit is marginal if the developers always run the unit tests before every commit (and there aren't a lot of environment- or architecture- sensitive properties in the code). If you have developers that always do that, you may not need continuous integration. If your developers are like most of us and are not actually that good at maintaining that level of discipline, continuous integration takes care of that for them. Remembering a checklist of things to do with each upload is the sort of thing computers are much better at doing than people. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87mwsb1wao....@windlord.stanford.edu
