Re: Downloading of test data

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Antonio Valentino <antonio.valentino@tiscali.it> writes:

> 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.

Downloading data to run automated code tests? That seems a bit silly,
but I suppose they have their reasons.

For the purpose of a Debian package, you can choose either to not run
the tests, or to treat the test data as part of the source and include
it as one of several source tarballs.

> My question is: is it sane to download data at package build time?

I think not.

> And, in case, should wget be set as build-dependency?

No, the automated tests should ideally be self-contained: they should
not rely on network access, only on the build dependencies and the
source package.

-- 
 \        “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no |
  `\   ground whatever for supposing it true.” —Bertrand Russell, _The |
_o__)                                       Value of Scepticism_, 1928 |
Ben Finney