Re: Bits from the Security Team (for those that care about bits)
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 7:19 AM, Iustin Pop <iustin@debian.org> wrote:
> First, tests run during a package build are good, but they do not
> ensure, for example, that the package as installed is working OK. I've
> been thinking that (also) providing tests to be run after the package is
> installed (and not on the build results) would be most useful in
> ensuring that both the build process and the packaging is correct.
Debian has definitely needed this for a long time.
I'm thinking that these automated post-install tests are something
that all distributions could benefit from and probably we should push
them upstream.
Automated post-install testing would be great, but it cannot apply in
all cases and should be complemented by README.test. I think both
approaches are needed.
For example:
libwww-topica-perl:
This is a perl module that interacts with a web service and screen
scrapes their email list archive format to convert it to mbox format.
Every few months I run the program on a specific list and compare it
to the previously saved mbox file. The list is long-dead so there are
no changes at all, unless the site changed its HTML and broke the
package. This is trivially automatable.
warzone2100:
This is an interactive game. Testing it involves playing for several
hours in single player mode and maybe trying to find someone to play
in multiplayer mode. Definitely not automatable. Probably the only
automatable test here would be to run it in Xvfb but that wouldn't
test the package usefully.
--
bye,
pabs
http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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