Recommendations on test data

[agx@sigxcpu.org (Guido Günther)]

Hi Martin,
On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 12:44:43AM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hey Guido,
> 
> Guido G?nther [2015-11-26 12:27 +0100]:
> > sometimes it's useful to be able to fetch resources via e.g. http from
> > the network (e.g. prebuilt vm images for testing libvirt). Are there any
> > recommendations on how to do this? Often one might rather want the
> > opposite - restrict network access (as detailed in e.g. 801895) but I
> > wonder if there's a need for a "needs-network" restrictions and maybe
> > even a way how to specify the URLs that can be reached?
> >
> > I didn't find any mention if network access is allowed/forbidden in
> > DEP-8 either.
> 
> As explained in bug 801895, positive or negative assertions about
> networking are rather impractical to make in a generic way, so I
> really want to keep these out of the spec.
> 
> That said, for normal package tests that run on Debian's or Ubuntu's
> production CI testbeds you should be able to download things from the
> internet. This might not be true for someone who runs the test locally
> of course, and then I think it's legitimate for the test to fail. If
> you want to make this nicer, you could make the test print a warning
> on download error, and skip the parts of the test that need downloaded
> data.

O.k., so it's basically up to the package itself to handle this
sensibly and network access isn't forbidden (as it's e.g. the case
during package builds). Thank you for clarifying!

Cheers,
 -- Guido