Bug#710696: libsoup2.4: FTBFS too much often

[Santiago Vila]

retitle 710696 libsoup2.4 FTBFS too much often (failing tests)
severity 710696 serious
thanks

Dear maintainers:

In the current version, failures are not specific to certain special
architectures but instead they are extremenly easy to get on amd64 too.

I'm attaching five different build logs which I got while checking for
"dpkg-buildpackage -A" (this package does not have explicit build-arch
and build-indep targets so building with "dpkg-buildpackage -A" is
essentially the same as building with "dpkg-buildpackage").


A diff between two build logs shows funny things like this:

< # random seed: R02S553c594aabddb5f5effd9069fb6e64bf
---
> # random seed: R02Sfdfd9fbd08c95de875cabecdf43a209a

Apparently, the test suite is run with parameters which are always
different.

I think this is a very bad idea for any package, because it makes
failures in the package build to be unreproducible.

If possible, I would modify the test suite so that those random seeds
are always the same, or at least the same for each Debian release
(think of a hash of the debian version number, for example).

If not, those tests based on random parameters should be just disabled
(or at least any test which is seen to fail), as package building
should not be a lottery. In fact, the package itself is marked here as
reproducible:

https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/libsoup2.4.html

but of course only when the package does not fail the tests.

Thanks.
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