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Re: Upcoming FTPMaster meeting



Bernhard R. Link wrote:
> I'd rather say "doing it right" means to properly test it's build to be
> robust. Only ever testing in an artifical environment has a certain
> outcome: certain failure.

That depends. How closely does the artificial environment mirror the
avarage system as measured by popcon? How closely does the environment
in which I test build my package mirror the average system? It actually
seems likely that my environment is more diverged from the average
user's environment than is a buildd. I have a random set of build
dependencies installed. Nobody else on the planet is likely to have the
same set. I pick weird settings for alternatives, etc. We're all
weirdos. It seems strange to expect that checking that an arbitrary
package builds in a single arbitrary weird environment will be much
benefit to a more normal user, or even to another weirdo.

Whatever benefit there is has already been diluted a lot by the DDs
who always build their packages in clean environments already. Something
that has already become enough of a best practice that it's *embarrasing*
to say I don't. Probably that feeling means that more than 50% of you do
it, so we've already lost 50% of the benefit of ad-hoc building. That was
ok because we gained other, larger benefits.

So I don't think that we need grand schemes of test building every
package in purposefully weird systems. We could probably do as well as
we do now by instead stracing builds of some fraction, checking that
all files they try to accress come from build dependencies. dpkg-depcheck
can nearly do that now -- just modify it to report accesses to non-installed
files.

-- 
see shy jo

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