Re: Running tests at build time?

[Raphael Geissert <geissert@debian.org>]

Russ Allbery wrote:

> Raphael Geissert writes:
> 
>> I was wondering why the test suite is not run at build time?
[...]
> 
> We could, particularly since Lintian is arch: all so the rather extended
> time that it takes the test suite to run doesn't hurt the buildds.  I
> suspect we're missing a bunch of build dependencies to let the test suite
> run, though.  (At the very least, CDBS, but I think that's only the tip of
> the iceberg.)

We'd need all of lintian's dependencies, build-essential, and the
libtest-*-perl modules used, at least.

> 
> The other potential problem is that, provided we're doing our maintenance
> work correctly and running the test suite before each upload, the test
> suite more frequently uncovers regressions in the test suite rather than
> in Lintian's output (such as from dpkg-dev starting to fix some other
> problem automatically, causing tests to fail in Lintian's test suite).
> 

Sure, but those very same changes might affect other parts of lintian.

At least the update scripts from private/ should be automatically run
periodically to detect changes and have up-to-date data.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer
www.debian.org - get.debian.net