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

[Uecker, Martin]

Hi Andreas,

Am Montag, den 21.09.2020, 09:45 +0200 schrieb 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.  

I know, this is also why I originally thought it would be
a good idea.

> 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.

If there were an easy way to log into a s390x machine
and debug the problem, the outcome would likely be a useful
bug report against GCC which would be useful to the community
and the s390x port.  But as things are, it only causes
unnecessary work for us to not get the package removed while
we learned nothing about the underlying issue.

> 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.

Well, the idea would be to do exactly this but pro-actively
for all architectures except amd64. We would still get
the information when tests fail (which is useful) but
avoid wasting effort on fixing it each time.

Best,
Martin

> Kind regards and thanks for working on bart
> 
>       Andreas.
>  
>