Bug#1019742: reprotest: add a variation that sets DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck

Philip Hands phil at hands.com
Wed Sep 14 15:00:04 BST 2022


Package: reprotest
Version: 0.7.22
Severity: wishlist

I suggest adding a 'nocheck' variation, that sets DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck
during the build, and enabling it by default.

The reason for doing so is that one could imagine that a package produces
differing results depending upon whether the tests were run or not, but also
(given that the tests will have passed during the normal build) the tests
failing during the varied build seems unlikely to be identifying faults that are
worth fixing, and so is just a waste of cycles.

This idea is prompted by `busybox` where the tests fail in the varied scenario,
despite the fact that the package is reproducible.

Here they are failing:

  https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/busybox/-/jobs/3227197

  (among other things, du produces weird results when the `fileordering`
   variation is active, claiming the 1MB directoy is 2MB so the tests fail, so
   the varied package is not produced, so we don't get to see that it was
   reproducible:
   https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/busybox/-/blob/master/testsuite/du/du-m-works
   )


I found a couple of ways of making the issue go away:

  1) disabling the 'fileordering' variation, thus:

    https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/busybox/-/commit/17387890c73388e1f56a6ae9fbc79783095b4e86

    https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/busybox/-/jobs/3233259

  2) telling the package to skip the tests when doing the variations:

    https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/busybox/-/commit/5260442e8ceea220fa36bdda169978d15108f781

    which is setting this in the salsa-ci.yml:
      SALSA_CI_REPROTEST_ARGS: --variations=environment.variables+=DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck

    https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/busybox/-/jobs/3235476


Option 2) is what I'm suggesting making into a default variation.

If nothing else it will speed up testing of packages with extensive test suits.

Cheers, Phil.



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