Packager, please don't disable tests
Dan Villiom Podlaski Christiansen <
danchr@...>
2011-03-06 00:30:33 GMT
Hi,
Someone recently mentioned on our IRC channel that the Gentoo build
file for hgsubversion disables some of our tests.[1] This doesn't seem
a terribly good idea.
The hgsubversion test suite is quite comprehensive, and most tests are
simplified versions of scenarios seen in real-world repositories. A
failing test is an indication that something is wrong, and disabling
the test merely suppresses that indication without addressing the
underlying issue. Assuming your test setup is indicative of the
experience your users will get, you are subjecting them to a broken
package known to either fail or cause incorrect results in certain
circumstances.
So, please don't disable any tests when packaging hgsubversion. If the
test failures are caused by bugs in hgsubversion, please report them
to us so they may be fixed. If the test failures are caused by
something in your environment, please report them; perhaps we can help
you address this or work around it in our code. In the mean time, it
would be prudent to not upgrade the package. Instead, the worst
possible course of action was chosen: don't tell anyone about the
breakage, disable the tests, and ship broken code to users.
Please help us rectify this, and please don't do it again.
[1]
<http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/dev-vcs/hgsubversion/hgsubversion-1.2.1.ebuild?view=markup#l30
>
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