[pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#850269: gpgme1.0: FTBFS randomly (not enough entropy)

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Mon 2017-01-23 19:21:30 -0500, Santiago Vila wrote:
>> > I wonder, however, why the tests need to generate a key at all,
>> > just to discard it after the package is built. Would not be possible
>> > to use a pregenerated key for the tests?
>> 
>> gpgme exercises functionality of the GnuPG suite, including key
>> generation.  If we were to use a pregenerated key, we might as well just
>> skip the test suite :)
>
> Well, it could be argued that the key creation part should be already
> covered by the test suite of gnupg itself.

hm, that wouldn't test whether gpgme is actually doing the right thing
to drive gpg, though.  I think we do still need that test in gpgme, just
like we'd need a higher-level test for a mail user agent that was
supposed to generate keys, or to do anything else that involves
randomness.  Build processes and testing should in general avoid the use
of randomness, but a test suite that tries to exercise code that should
use randomness in the real world (even at other lower levels) should
still be allowed access to that randomness during the compile-time
testing.  no?

   --dkg