Are regression/unit test suites being run on upstream sources?

[Barry Hawkins]

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Team,
    In the DebConf5 video series, A.J. Towns' first video on Debbugs
Tips and Tricks, A.J. asks, "How many people have regression tests in
their package that get run every time it builds?"  In response,
apparently few people raise their hands and A.J. says, "In the future,
everyone should be putting their hand up to that question."
    In working on a source package I have inherited, I noticed that the
test suite included with upstream source was not being run because "it
hung when it was run with kaffe."  I have also had some people react
with what seemed like surprise in the past when I mentioned that I was
having trouble with some of the unit tests being run in the lucene
source package and it was delaying the upcoming release of that package.
    This has me wondering; people aren't foregoing the unit test suites
on upstream packages during a build in order to get a package into main
more expediently, are they?  It is my hope that this is not being done.
 While unit test suites should not be considered regression tests, they
are at least a low-cost minimal level of assurance that upstream uses to
ensure that their artifacts are behaving as expected.
    The thought that people might be avoiding these test suites in order
to ignore issues that surface in using the free runtimes is quite
disconcerting to me, so I wanted to bring that up and just make sure
that we are all on the same page that, at the very least, an upstream
source should pass its own unit tests when built as a Debian package.
Short-circuiting those tests is a favor to noone, and a disservice to
our larger Debian community, whom we hope to introduce to the wealth of
software that a solid Java packaging effort can provide.

Regards,
- --
Barry Hawkins
All Things Computed
site: www.alltc.com
weblog: www.yepthatsme.com

Registered Linux User #368650
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