Re: Downloading of test data

[Gergely Nagy <algernon@madhouse-project.org>]

Asheesh Laroia <lists@asheesh.org> writes:

> 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.

Another option is to package up the test data as a
pyepr_$version.orig-testdata.tar.gz, and with a 3.0 source format,
that'll be part of the source package, will get unpacked by dpkg-source
into pyepr-$version/testdata/ and so on and so forth.

I'd recommend doing this instead of introducing a separate package to
build-depend on.

Doing this also has an advantage over repacking the upstream sources to
include the test data: you don't need to repack.

(For an example of a very simple package that uses multiple upstream
tarballs, see git-flow)

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