On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 7:19 AM, Iustin Pop <ius...@debian.org> wrote:
> First, tests run during a package build are good, but they do not > ensure, for example, that the package as installed is working OK. I've > been thinking that (also) providing tests to be run after the package is > installed (and not on the build results) would be most useful in > ensuring that both the build process and the packaging is correct. Debian has definitely needed this for a long time. I'm thinking that these automated post-install tests are something that all distributions could benefit from and probably we should push them upstream. Automated post-install testing would be great, but it cannot apply in all cases and should be complemented by README.test. I think both approaches are needed. For example: libwww-topica-perl: This is a perl module that interacts with a web service and screen scrapes their email list archive format to convert it to mbox format. Every few months I run the program on a specific list and compare it to the previously saved mbox file. The list is long-dead so there are no changes at all, unless the site changed its HTML and broke the package. This is trivially automatable. warzone2100: This is an interactive game. Testing it involves playing for several hours in single player mode and maybe trying to find someone to play in multiplayer mode. Definitely not automatable. Probably the only automatable test here would be to run it in Xvfb but that wouldn't test the package usefully. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/AANLkTikojANFHmf9=AEKauwB+BXf2O_ud=ON=X5x=i...@mail.gmail.com
