[R-pkg-team] Bug#983748: dh-r: pkg-r-autopkgtest breaks autopkgtests

[Graham Inggs]

Hi Andreas

On Mon, 1 Mar 2021 at 10:49, Andreas Tille <tille at debian.org> wrote:
> However, the issue should have been become obvious even in unstable
> 10 days ago.

Well, it was visible in unstable, e.g. in r-bioc-destiny [1], and also
on the tracker page [2] it says "Debci reports failed tests", but
certainly not obvious.

> So I'm not sure whether my latest upload will trigger
> those issues in 10 days again instead of breaking things immediately
> (which will hopefully not be the case).

We will need to keep an eye on it.

I suspect the reason that no autopkgtests were triggered, was that no
package besides lintian has a test-dependency on dh-r (or
pkg-r-autopkgtest).  I wonder if adding pkg-r-autopkgtest to the test
dependencies of all packages that make use of pkg-r-autopkgtest will
catch similar problems in future.  It's way too late in the release
cycle for a big change like this, but maybe something to consider for
bookworm.  We should discuss this with debci team.

Regards
Graham


[1] https://ci.debian.net/packages/r/r-bioc-destiny/
[2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/r-bioc-destiny