During the last years there have been talks about which tests to run/enable/disable/... during package build on IRC. It seems that the preliminary results were never written down, which leads to the same questions and the painful exercise of digging up memories :) I'm proposing to add a section about test suites to our group policy; for that reason I've now written down a first draft of what I think was the consensus (added below). Please comment/fix/improve the text; we can then either finalise it during the BoF at DebConf next week (or commit it before, it there are no controversies). Cheers, gregor === diff for policy.pod, without TOC and copyright years === Index: policy.pod =================================================================== --- policy.pod (revision 77577) +++ policy.pod (working copy) @@ -254,6 +256,51 @@ =back +=head1 Test suites + +CPAN distributions typically come with a test suite that is run at build time. +As a general rule, we want to run as many tests as possible in order to catch errors. +Some details need to be taken into account: + +=over 4 + +=item * + +We can't enable or need to disable tests that need internet access. +(If there is no specific environment variable, a patch is required.) + +=item * + +We don't enable tests that are explicitly declared as upstream/author/release tests by the author +(typically via an environment variable as I<RELEASE_TESTING>, I<AUTHOR_TESTING, >or I<TEST_AUTHOR>). + +Test designed to be run in automatic builds/installs (usually enabled by setting +I<AUTOMATED_TESTING>) are fine. + +=item * + +Some tests are, even if not declared explicitly as release tests, a bit fragile and tend +to break with new releases of the test modules, or test style and not functionality +(Test::Perl::Critic, Test::Spelling, Test::Kwalitee, ...). It might be helpful to avoid running them. + +=item * + +Tests that need display access usually work with B<xvfb>: + + debian/control: + Build-Depends(-Indep): ..., xvfb, xauth, ... + + debian/rules: + override_dh_auto_test: + xvfb-run -a dh_auto_test + +=item * + +Some tests need versioned build dependencies for dual-lifed modules (e.g. B<Test::More>), +cf. L<Build and runtime dependencies|/"Build and runtime dependencies">. + +=back + =head1 Debian Maintainers practice The Debian project has adopted the Debian Maintainers (DM) concept (cf. -- .''`. Homepage: http://info.comodo.priv.at/ - PGP/GPG key ID: 0x8649AA06 : :' : Debian GNU/Linux user, admin, & developer - http://www.debian.org/ `. `' Member of VIBE!AT & SPI, fellow of Free Software Foundation Europe `- BOFH excuse #442: Trojan horse ran out of hay
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