Re: autopkgtest-pkg-perl going forward
Hi,
Niko Tyni wrote (11 Oct 2014 12:06:46 GMT) :
> I've documented the current state at
> http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/autopkgtest.html
> Summary: I think this is pretty cool :)
Thanks a lot, and congrats to everybody who made this happen!
[Disclaimer: I've not read that page yet, and half of my assumptions
below may very well be wrong. If that's the case, please don't bother
correcting me: just tell me to gather information before I post silly
stuff on a mailing-list. Sorry, and thanks in advance for bearing
with me.]
> 2. people uploading a package with a Testsuite header should try to
> verify it works. This probably means setting up a chroot for adt-run
> to do it properly; there are some pointers for this in autopkgtest.html.
I'm a little bit concerned about this one. I'm pretty sure I can live
with it, but it's still probably worth raising this point: this
requirement adds manual steps to the "updating a package" workflow.
I'd like to question why humans need to do it by hand, while an army
of robots, somewhere, are going to do it anyway.
I'm aware that the archive is not gated by the autopkgtest results
(yet), which is probably a part of the answer to my question: we want
to avoid uploading broken stuff to the archive, so for the time being,
we have to run these tests ourselves before uploading.
OTOH, my understanding is that ci.d.n runs autopkgtests on every
reverse-dependency whenever a given package is updated. This tests not
only the updated package itself, but also how it impacts the rest of
the archive. How I see it, I think it's, by far, the most important
part of the entire exercise as far as our packages are concerned
(because I dare hoping that as long as the build-time test suite
passes, in the vast majority of the cases, autopkgtests failure will
indicate either bugs in the autopkgtests machinery, or changes in the
test suite that require adapting that machinery, rather than actual
bugs in the code). If my understanding is correct, running adt-run on
an individual package before uploading is *not* testing this.
So, all in all I'm not sure if it's worth it to run the autopkgtests
on an individual package before uploading. I believe I'd rather spend
the same time to make sure I'm subscribed to the relevant feeds on
ci.d.n, so that I'll be aware when something I've uploaded breaks
anything (that could be its own autopkgtests, or other packages').
What do you think?
My secondary question is: have we got the glue (e.g. pbuilder hooks or
similar) anywhere to *automatically* run these tests after building
a package? (OK, it looks trivial to write once one has the right
chroots ready, but still, might be suboptimal if half of us each write
their own :)
Cheers,
--
intrigeri
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