[Debian-med-packaging] Running test suite [Was: r7382 - trunk/packages/mafft/trunk/debian]

[Andreas Tille]

On Fri, Aug 05, 2011 at 03:19:09PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> first I noticed that there was something wrong with the tests, that were ran
> before the binaries were built, so I moved them in override_dh_install.
> 
> Then I realised that the cause of this morning's reported bug was that the
> binaries were built during override_dh_install, instead of during
> override_dh_autobuild, because it was mistyped override_dh_build.
> 
> After fixing that, I could have moved again the tests from override_dh_install
> to override_dh_auto_test, but I forgot ;)

Ahh, OK, so basically nothing wrong with override_dh_auto_test - good.
 
> By the way, I find the timing of that bug report very intersting: basically, the
> package in Sid and Wheezy was broken for a long time with nobody realising.  It
> suggests that most of this packages users are using Stable, and that we can not
> expect much user testing, in particular in the 10 day window for Testing transition.

That's probably the fate of low popcon packages at all.  If I build a
package I usually intall it on my machine and try to start the binary at
least to get some help screen.  This is certainly no *test* but in most
cases the only thing I can do lacking real data and experience what to
do / what to expect.

I added an according item to

    http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMedTodo
 
> We really need tests in the packages that do not have some, even minimal ones
> like printing the help message.  That could be a recommendation in our policy.
> Buy perhaps DEP 8 will provide a nice framework without us reinventing the
> wheel.

I'm also quite keen on DEP 8.  We scratched the issue a bit in the
Debian Science roundtable @ DebConf.  You might like to watch the video
also for upstream-metadata.yaml.

Kind regards

      Andreas. 

-- 
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