Re: New GnomeGoal proposal: InstalledTests

[Simon McVittie <simon mcvittie collabora co uk>]

On 26/04/13 18:26, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> Not to mention, build mechanisms generally use tarballs and prefer
> them

If the tarballs produced by cgit become the recommended thing for
tarball-based build systems to consume - perhaps by having a branch "off
to one side" that does contain the generated Autotools goo - are they
deterministic, even across git/cgit upgrades (or, potentially, switching
from cgit to some other thing)?

Many tarball-based build systems are of the form "download
glib-2.36.0.tar.xz from $MIRROR, then check that its SHA256 is
0123...def" (and in those that don't, that's probably a security
vulnerability anyway).

In rpm and dpkg, the tarball is copied into the downstream source
package (rather than being downloaded on-demand from off-site as in,
e.g., BSD ports), but there's still value in the tarball used for glib
2.36.0-1 and glib 2.36.0-7 being exactly the same. (If nothing else,
Debian only keeps one copy per upstream version, to reduce the size of
its package download mirrors from ridiculous to merely very large.)

"make distcheck" also has value even if you don't care about the
resulting tarball: it tests various things which are not typically done
by maintainers for normal "hacking" builds, but still ought to work.
(Out-of-tree builds, installation, uninstallation, DESTDIR, alternative
${prefix} and so on; in Telepathy, we also compile with --disable-debug
during distcheck, precisely because maintainers' normal builds would
basically never test that path otherwise.)

    S