Bug#623960: python-apt: FTBFS: Test failure

[Daniel Schepler <dschepler@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday 26 April 2011 02:43:10 Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> In what hell of broken environment do you build packages in? git still
> provides git-core, thus the test cannot fail yet (and does not fail in
> an up-to-date sid sbuild environment or the buildds).

OK, this was in fact in my pbuildd environment, where the aim is to rebuild 
Debian from scratch (or as much so as possible).  So the apt repository it 
uses as a package source only contains packages which have been built so far, 
and at the time of getting to python-apt it hadn't built git yet.

But in general, it just seems like a bad idea to depend on the global apt 
lists to be in a certain state for the tests.  For example, what if the git 
package maintainers decide to drop the transitional packages and provides?  Or 
worse yet, drop just the transitional packages and keep the provides, so the 
test as I read it might pass but won't be testing what it's supposed to.  
Couldn't you provide a small Packages file which contains what you need and 
make the tests more self-contained?
-- 
Daniel Schepler