Bug#930487: lintian: use GitLab caching of test packages to speed up test suite CI

[Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com>]

Hi Chris,

On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 1:33 PM Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org> wrote:
>
> I've been hacking on this on a Salsa-local fork of Lintian that splits
> the generation of the test packages and the testing itself, crucially
> caching the result of the former if the tests and some other key files
> have not changed.

How do you tell when files have changed? I would like to use an MD5
manifest of all files generated after templating. That will also catch
changes in defaults and templates---even missing files.

Eventually, the expected tags (or output, if applicable) should be
excluded from that manifest, as should those portions of each 'desc'
file that apply only to lintian invocation (i.e. Profile,
Output-Format) or runner behavior (i.e. Match-Strategy,
Test-Architectures). This will require a splitting of all 'desc' files
in the test directories. Also, the specifications for test packages
should then be moved into dedicated directories in each test, named
'$test/test-object' or similar.

Kind regards,
Felix