Re: Downloading of test data

[Asheesh Laroia <lists@asheesh.org>]

Excerpts from Antonio Valentino's message of Sat Aug 13 07:09:57 -0400 2011:
> Hi mentors,
> I have a package (pyepr) that provides a small python extension written
> in cython.
> The upstream source includes a test suite that needs some data to be
> downloaded from the internet (398K) using wget.
> Note that data are only used for testing, they are not installed.

It's not particularly sane to download data at package build time. You
could package that data separately, and then build-depend on the test
data.

By depending on data from the Internet, it means that the package build
process isn't necessarily repeatable. It also means that a remote
party gets notified whenever Debian builds a package, or whenever any
individual rebuilds the package from source.

-- Asheesh.