Bug#926409: lintian: autopkgtest takes very long to finish

["Chris Lamb" <lamby@debian.org>]

tags 926409 + moreinfo
thanks

Hi Balint,

> Lintian has a lot of tests which is great for coverage, but maybe some
> of them could be skipped in autopkgtest runs.

Interesting. I guess I would have three follow-up questions here:

 * On what criterion or criteria could we include or exclude tests
   from the autopkgtest runs? Whilst we could skip the unit tests (as
   these are "just" Perl that is unlikely to vary) the most
   interesting ones to run in terms of detecting regressions in an
   real-world environment (the entire point of autopkgtests from my
   point of view) would be the tests of the checks themselves and
   these likely constitute the vast majority of the total time.

 * I'm not sure *how* we can speed up the tests. I mean, they all
   essentially involve building Debian packages with all the usual
   debhelper calls, etc. Speeding *this* up is somewhat out-of-scope
   of this Lintian wishlist issue, alas.
   
 * Why not simply increase Ubuntu's timeout? I would concede this is
   not the best use of CI resources, but the trade-off with "human"
   time would appear to be worth it here.

However, perhaps Felix has some input here as he has been doing a lot
of work on the test suite recently?


Best wishes,

-- 
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     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
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