Bug#470091: ltp package in Debian
Hello,
On Fri, 30 May 2008 16:24:18 +0200, Dustin Kirkland
<kirkland@canonical.com> wrote:
On Fri, 2008-05-30 at 05:04 +0200, Jiří Paleček wrote:
Well, when I first tried to use ltp, there were the other bugs that made
ltp totally nonfunctional, and these were already filed.
I agree with this--LTP has problems. There are still bashisms present
in shell scripts. It does not always follow the Filesystem Hierarchy
Standard [1]. Some of its tests have a bias toward other Linux
distributions where much of the early development was performed.
"Fixing the functionality" provided by the LTP is a noble goal, and I
absolutely support this. However, that should be done upstream with the
LTP community.
Well, some yes, some not. Bashisms, certainly. Segfaults in echo6, too.
But I'm not sure about the FHS issues - if you read the READMEs, you can
see ltp is supposed to run from its source code directory which isn't
against the FHS, but I guess it's up to the packager to create a
FHS-installable package, then. So is the bias towards other distributions:
for example the syslog tests, at the first sight, support Debian. However,
this support is "at the first sight only" and could have never really
worked, the way it's written. Or it worked and was broken afterwards,
which is even worse. So, do you think it's not better to maintain an own
patch, which is quite simple, if that means to streamline the code and is
easier, because I don't have to think about not breaking eg. Fedora, as
opposed to pushing a more complex patch (because it has to support more
variants) upstream and hoping nobody else changes that in a way that
breaks Debian and doesn't notice that?
I'm offering to update the nearly-two-year-old Debian LTP package to
something more recent, and continue maintaining and improving the
package. I would like to focus the current discussion on pertinent
packaging issues that need to be solved for this to happen.
I think I agree here. The packaging issues (and I think that includes
missing files and bad paths) should be solved first. For example, I tried
updating the copyright file and found some dfsg-nonfree files. But I also
found this (testcases/kernel/syscalls/nftw/Makefile and 3 other files):
#
# $Copyright: $
# Copyright (c) 1984-1999
# Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
#
# This software is furnished under a license and may be used
# only in accordance with the terms of that license and with the
# inclusion of the above copyright notice. This software may not
# be provided or otherwise made available to, or used by, any
# other person. No title to or ownership of the software is
# hereby transferred.
I really don't know what to think about it.
Also, the package needs thorough testing.
Then, as what you call a "noble goal", it would be really good to package
a bigger fraction of the source package (open_posix_testsuite, realtime
tests, DOTS, etc.)
So I started my own packaging and found out there were many other
bugs.
Interesting. I'm willing to drop the package I've prepared, withdraw
the proposal I've submitted for maintenance, and sync the Ubuntu LTP
packages to your packaging, if you're willing to assume ownership of
Debian LTP and update the Debian package accordingly.
I was hoping for a more enthusiastic answer... But, I have changed my
packaging from quilt patches to git repository. If you want, I'll make
that public.
Regards
Jiri Palecek
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