On 25.08.2018 09:34, Rafael Laboissière wrote:
Package octave-level-set, version 0.3.0-1, failed to run the unit tests
on Debian CI [1]. This happened because several unit tests run “pkg
load parallel”. I think I fixed the problem in version 0.3.0-2 of the
package by adding a dependency on octave-parallel.
I am not really happy with this “fix”, because parallel is not really a
dependency of level-set (at least, the upstream author does not declare
it).
We could declare a “suggests” relationsships, which isn't possible upstream.
Now, there is another package in a similar situation: octave-vibes run
“pkg load interval” in some unit tests [2]. I am not sure it will be
appropriate to make octave-vibes depend on octave-interval, since the
package works perfectly without it (besides the mentioned unit test
failures).
In this particular case I'd introduce a “recommends” relationship, since
octave-vibes is very likely to be used together with octave-interval. If
you want to plot intervals with vibes, you are going to need an interval
data type.
It would be perfect if there was a way to add an extra dependency for
autopkgtest. I am not sure that this can be accomplished through
debian/tests/control.autodep8.
Any ideas?
Would it be possible to define “recommends” and “suggests” relationships
(as described above) and use these as install-dependencies for the
autopkgtests? This way we could easily enable these unit tests.
However, the unit tests should probably be modified upstream and only be
run if the needed other package is available. Since there is no strong
dependency declared upstream, one cannot assume that other packages are
available.