packging guidelines and tests...

[Gabor Szabo]

Hi Chris,

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 7:02 PM, Chris Weyl <cweyl at alumni.drew.edu> wrote:
> Hey all --
>
>  I was rather happy to see that the draft perl guidelines I'd worked on
>  putting together had been taken up and, with some modifications,
>  adopted by the FPC (thanks spot!).  However, looking over the meeting
>  minutes, I was caught off guard by a couple comments that had been
>  made w.r.t. the very weak suggestion of packaging tests.
>
>  I'd brought this matter up quite a while ago now, with a rather strong
>  response by one person on bugs, and a fairly indifferent result on
>  this list.[1]  I'd articulated why I thought it was a good idea, and
>  my own desire for _consistency_ in packaging them.  I've tried to be
>  consistent with that position (e.g. "they can make good docs, and
>  others may find them useful even when I don't") since then, and really
>  haven't heard anything at all one way or the other about this since
>  then.
>
>  The one response I've seen about this from someone from the Fedora
>  perl user community (not including those who serve on the FPC) was
>  "Some way to run the test suite would cure my last gripe with
>  replacing CPAN.pm with rpms."[2]  e.g. I don't use them so much as
>  docs, but I'd really like to run the actual test suite on my boxen.
>
>  Soo...  I'm genuinely disinterested in starting Yet Another Fedora
>  Packaging Flamewar over this. :)  However, if there is a strong and
>  widespread opposition to cleanly and consistently packaging tests in
>  %doc, I certainly don't want to be doing that.
>
>  However....   I still find it valuable, and can certainly see the
>  value in being able to run the same tests the buildsys runs against
>  your installed system.  (e.g. You're setting up a Catalyst app, and
>  something funky is going on.  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to test
>  your actual installed base of modules?)  What if:
>
>  * tests are split into -test subpackages and discouraged from
>  wholesale inclusion in %doc (tho still not a blocker)
>  * installed under a consistent location (say...
>  %{_libexecdir}/perl_tests/%{cpandist}/ ?), and
>  * an optional/alternate perl spec template with subpackage -test
>  predefined was created to help with this?
>
>  This might be the cleanest way to satisfy those who'd like to see the
>  tests distributable as doc, those who'd like to see the test suites
>  out of %doc, and those who'd like to run them as actual tests.  This
>  also wouldn't change the status quo much -- we're not talking about
>  guideline changes or any such, and no one would be required to do
>  anything.  However, I do think there's a lot of potential value to be
>  had here, and it's worth exploring :)
>
>                                          -Chris
>
>  [1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-perl-devel-list/2007-June/msg00032.html
>  [2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-perl-devel-list/2007-June/msg00034.html

Having the tests around as yet another set of examples and/or
documentation sounds good.

Keeping them to run them again will be more difficult
On the QA Hackathon in Oslo
http://perl-qa.hexten.net/wiki/index.php/Oslo_QA_Hackathon_2008
people (again) raised the desire to run all the tests of a module
again after installation.
Maybe at some later point after we have installed other things that
might interfere withe the module.
As I understand you are suggesting the same the difference is only
that you are suggesting it using rpm
while on the hackathon we talked about CPAN.pm installations.

There are at least two problems with this
1) In many times the tests assume the directory structure as they have
it in the distribution tarballs.
2) In many cases they also use various extra files.

In the rpm land it might be better to create separate source packages
for each CPAN distribution so
once can install those and run the tests from there.

In any case I think it would be better to first discuss this on the
perl-qa list
http://lists.cpan.org/showlist.cgi?name=perl-qa and see what is the
opinion there.

regards
    Gabor