debci/autopkgtest issue for static analysis tools [shellcheck]
Hello team,
I'd like to expose an issue I have with shellcheck, see if there's any
alternatives and/or hopefully motivate someone to fix it eventually.
As you can see right now on shellcheck's migration excuses [0]:
autopkgtest for initramfs-tools/0.140: amd64: Regression...
autopkgtest for kdump-tools/1:1.6.8.4: amd64: Regression...
If you look at the logs, you will notice that these tests are failing
because shellcheck is identifying new issues it wasn't before, this is
not the first time this happens.
So the issue is that other tools are using shellcheck as part of their
integration testing [1], and every new release of shellcheck gets
blocked when migrating to testing due to other packages relying on it.
Right now the only options seem to be:
A) Wait for the packages to be fixed
B) Contact the release team and ask them to manually unblock it
C) Mark those tests as flaky
I would like it if autopkgtest[2] could provide a way of saying a
certain dependency can **never** be the cause of a test failure, and I
assume all static analysis tools would want to have that for any
package relying on it for tests.
If the maintainter of such static analysis tool wants to have those
checks as tests, they can add it directly to the package.
What are your thoughts on it?
[0] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/shellcheck
[1] Even though static analysis is not strictly speaking integration
testing, I don't mind since we want to have some tool making sure the
check passes anyway.
[2] I assume autopkgtest is the correct place for that, but any
solution would be fine for me as long as it's possible to avoid the
hassle for every new upload of shellcheck.
Thank you!
--
Samuel Henrique <samueloph>
Reply to: