Howdy all, I am experimenting with Autopkgtest[0] for Python library packages. Perhaps others can use what I've made and/or make suggestions for improvement.
The ‘python-lockfile’ Debian packaging VCS now has a smoke test suite <URL:https://alioth.debian.org/scm/loggerhead/collab-maint/pkg-python-lockfile/trunk/files/head:/debian/tests/>. The goal is to perform a simple “smoke test” to verify the correct installation of the Python libraries from the Debian packages, for all relevant Python interpreters. A secondary goal is to have the actual smoke test code be re-usable, possibly incorporated into a standard Debian Python packager toolkit. * debian/tests/control Specifies two tests to run, ‘smoke-python2’ and ‘smoke-python3’. The dependencies explicitly specify the Python 2 and Python 3 library modules respectively. Can this be automated better? * debian/tests/smoke-python2, debian/tests/smoke-python3 These are Bash programs that just run a Python module under every available Python interpreter. Running ‘py{,3}versions -i’ gets all the installed Python interpreters. Can this fail, e.g. can the set of interpreters be different from what interpreters the package was built for? These scripts are very simple, but not simple enough that I was comfortable stuffing them directly into the ‘debian/tests/control’ file. Is that a shortcoming of the Autopkgtest specification? * debian/tests/smoke_test.py A module that runs a simple suite of smoke tests: emit the interpreter description, fetch the Python distribution of the installed library and emit that, import the modules and emit those. Implemented as a command-line program so that the distribution name, and the set of module names, are specified by the caller. This hopefully makes ‘smoke_test.py’ reuseable for many Python library packages. Does this module meet your idea of a simple “smoke test” for Python library packages? Should it do more? Is there interest in getting this work into one of the Debian packaging tookits for Python packages? How should that be done? [0] Doesn't seem to have a coherent website or documentation index. Try <URL:http://packaging.ubuntu.com/html/auto-pkg-test.html>. -- \ “The Vatican is not a state.… a state must have territory. This | `\ is a palace with gardens, about as big as an average golf | _o__) course.” —Geoffrey Robertson, 2010-09-18 | Ben Finney
