Bug#786644: should reproducible builds vary nocheck?

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 14 Dec 2024 at 20:47:47 +0000, Rebecca N. Palmer wrote:
>(Packages that ship test results/tools and 
>want to make this optional are probably supposed to use 
>DEB_BUILD_PROFILES=noinsttest instead.)

For the record:

For packages that ship test tools (automated tests, manual tests or
examples to be run at a later time), and want to make them optional,
yes they are supposed to use DEB_BUILD_PROFILES=noinsttest instead of
nocheck. For example, gtk4 and libsdl3 implement this correctly, to the
best of my ability; so do dbus and glib2.0, which have more complicated
interactions with other build profiles like nocheck.

For packages that ship test *results*, the recommendation is "don't"
(because in practice it's very rare for them to be reproducible)
and this is out-of-scope for DEB_BUILD_PROFILES=noinsttest.
<https://wiki.debian.org/BuildArtifacts> and
<https://salsa.debian.org/debian/sbuild/-/merge_requests/14> are a
possible solution to that, which I should pick up and revisit at some
point (it's on my list but my list is very long).

     smcv