Re: jhbuild continuous integration testing: status and plans

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Fri, 2013-03-08 at 18:02 +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On 08/03/13 14:45, Colin Walters wrote:
> > This gets back to something I want to figure out how to do, which is
> > standardize metadata for tests (e.g. "this test requires a public
> > Internet connection", "this test requires a logged in desktop session",
> > "this test requires root", etc.).
>
> It might be worth discussing this with the authors of
> <http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep8/>, which does more or less the same
> thing, for the same reasons.

Yeah, I saw it; the core conflict between what I want and that is that
the requirement for being run from an unpacked source tree.

Basically, if one is making an operating system, binary compatibility is
of foremost importance.  Thus, for example, I want to run *old* already
built glib test binaries against *new* libglib.  Having to carry around
the old glib source tree and prepare it would be annoying, and moreover,
I really don't want the binaries to build anything.  You'd need to have
Test-Build-Depends.

Thus I want the tests to be installed and run like any other binary, and
not have a special relationship with the source.

That said, sharing some of the metadata is likely possible; one could
even imagine a tool which auto-generates the Debian stuff from installed
tests.