On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 10:25:30AM +0200, David MENTRE wrote:
> After monitoring the build and status of OCaml packages in Ubuntu, I
> know need to look at a way to test that the packages really work.
It is true that we need some better automatic testing, but note that
the most appropriate way to test things is having program-specific
tests. This will not happen until our upstream will learn to write
tests, and unfortunately it appears that OCaml developers have, in
general and with respect to other communities, a lack of testing
culture à la unit testing.
> So, I'm thinking at a kind of script that would:
> - trigger an install or update of the binary package[1] and verifies
> the package is correctly installed;
> - launch a simple test of the program (at least "prog --version" or
> "prog --help") for both byte code and native code versions.
I think this approach will be quite pointless: --help and --version
are standard in GNU(-like) apps, but are not there very often for
OCaml programs.
In the past I've thought about similar issues, with the goal of making
them land in dh-ocaml. My strategy was more geared towards dynamic
loading of bytecode OCaml objects.
For instance, for all libraries I maintain, before the final upload I
use to install the lib (of course!), launch the ocaml toplevel, and
check whether #require "meta-name";; works. If it does, you are
reasonably sure that various things are working, like:
- META file and dependencies
- C stubs
- bytecode objects are installed
The appropriate place where to do that however, is not an external
program, but something that is integrated in the build process and
which is automatically triggered on the appropriate packages without
need package-specific actions. Today, this place is the dh-ocaml
package.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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