[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#969804: Bug#969804: bart: autopkgtest should be marked superficial

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Martin,

On Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 05:50:34PM +0000, Uecker, Martin wrote:
> > I'm not sure whether this is a good idea in general.  If
> > we can be sure that for s390x there is an issue with the
> > tool chain I could imagine something like:
> > 
> >   if build on s390x
> >       run_test || true # FIXME: explanation why we ignore test
> >   else
> >       run_test
> > 
> > I do not think that ignoring the tests on all architectures
> > is a good idea.
> 
> Without any way to investigate it is difficult
> to be sure.
> 
> But we run very comprehensive tests upstream.

I'm pretty sure about this and I appreciate the effort you are doing so.

> So it is
> actually very likely that all problems we can catch in
> Debian (and not already earlier) are problems
> with the tool chain on some architecture.

To the best of my knowledge the fact that a test runs on amd64 but fails
on some other architecture is not only caused by issues in the tool
chain.  For instance recently I learned that for instance if char is
used as "very short int" it matters whether it is declared as char,
signed char or unsigned char.  To spot this kind of issues it makes
perfectly sense to run the test suite on all architectures - except
for those where we expicitly know that a broken tool chain is breaking
the build.

Thus my suggestion to exclude only the affected s390x from the test.
If my suggestion is not worded clearly enough feel free to ping me and
I implement my suggestion in d/rules to show what I mean.

Kind regards and thanks for working on bart

      Andreas.
 

-- 
http://fam-tille.de