[rb-general] Finding Packages With Tests

[Omar Navarro Leija]

> when you say "reproducibly" here, do you mean 'repeatable'?
I mean it in the same way as reproducible-builds.org, our research is
largely inspired by the DRB effort!

> I'd strongly recommend you switch to Debian Buster, or at least Stretch.
Both Jessie and Wheeze are EOLed by Debian (though for both (e)LTS support
exists.) I really wouldn't base any development on them, not even research
development ;)
Yeah... We plan to move up once the current paper is published. We picked
Wheezy since wanted the "most" amount of unreproducible packages to show
our tools turns them into reproducible. Our development is on modern Linux
Distros and our tool should work on all.

On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 11:35 AM Chris Lamb <lamby at debian.org> wrote:

> Hi Omar,
>
> > Is there some way to identify which packages which have built in tests?
>
> Unfortunately there is no canonical or general way to identify
> Debian packages that "run" a testuite.
>
> Not only will many packages will always tests as part of their
> build, there are a myriad of ways in which the various Debian
> build systems will attempt locate and run tests.
>
> Just as a concrete example, the "debian/rules" package for
> countless packages is merely:
>
>     #!/usr/bin/make -f
>
>     %:
>             dh $@
>
> .. which will automatically look for a Makefile (or similar) and
> then magically work out whether there is a "tests" target, etc. etc.
> There are parallel ones for Python, Go, CMake, etc. etc. Even if we
> could list them all, I am sure we would be missing 50% of them.
>
> Furthermore, some test failures are deliberately ignored for good
> reasons so knowing that a package "had" a testsuite would not make
> running those tests particularly meanintful.
>
> What, in more detail, are you trying to achieve by identifying
> packages with tests? I suspect there may be a better solution.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> --
>       ,''`.
>      : :'  :     Chris Lamb
>      `. `'`      lamby at debian.org 🍥 chris-lamb.co.uk
>        `-
>
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