Re: Test suite checker

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Lucas Kanashiro:
> Hi lintian maintainers,
> 
> I started to work on a patch for lintian to verify whether a package
> have a functional test suite. I intend to that to notify maintainers
> about the importance to have this kind of tests in your packages, I
> talked about it with some others DDs and some of them do not have any
> idea what I am saying. I know this might be annoying, but I set the
> severity as a wishlist. Nowadays, Debian CI covers almost 20% of the
> source packages in archive, the idea here is to increase this number. 
> 
> I followed the contributing instructions, did my patch, but when I ran
> all the test suite I broke many of the others tests. This occur because
> most of the packages used in tests do not have Testsuite field in
> d/control, so lintian (with my patch) started to emit a new info tag. I
> saw that I can set a default variable to be used in all tests, but I
> did not want to do that because my own test depends on a package
> without Testsuite field. Then I thought two non-elegant options: add
> "Testsuite: autopkgtest" in all broken tests or add this new tag to
> expected tags lists. I do not like any of them and I was not able to
> find other checker that tries to verify the existence of one optional
> field. So I am here to ask you some help to find the best way to do it.
> 
> Thanks in advance :)
> Cheers.  
> 

Hi Lucas,

Thanks for working on improving lintian. :)

Just adding the field (without having a d/tests/control file) triggers
another tag, so that in itself is not an option. :)  But what you can do
is to add a tests/control file to the "templates" directories in
t/templates/tests and let dpkg-source add the field for us.
  We probably also need to do something for t/templates/source for but I
recommend starting with getting the tests in t/tests to work.

For your test (and the other tests in t/tests/testsuite-*), we will need
a script to wipe the debian/tests directory.  I think you want a
"pre_build" script for that (please see t/tests/README for more
information).

Thanks,
~Niels