Debian Bug report logs - #994139
lintian: warning about superficial autopkgtests is counterproductive

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Package: lintian; Maintainer for lintian is Debian Lintian Maintainers <[email protected]>; Source for lintian is src:lintian (PTS, buildd, popcon).

Reported by: Simon McVittie <[email protected]>

Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2021 18:09:01 UTC

Severity: normal

Found in version lintian/2.105.0

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From: Felix Lechner <[email protected]>
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2021 13:49:35 -0700
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Subject: Re: Bug#994139: lintian: warning about superficial autopkgtests is counterproductive
To: Simon McVittie <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected], Daniel Kahn Gillmor <[email protected]>, 
	Paul Wise <[email protected]>, [email protected]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Hi,

On Sun, Sep 12, 2021 at 1:17 PM Simon McVittie <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> If that's the case, I would have expected it to be emitted for packages
> that have absolutely no autopkgtest coverage

You are right! The tag is issued when 'Testsuite: autopkgtest' was
declared in d/control but no d/tests/control is present. [1] It should
arguably be an error instead of info. [2]

Lintian does not currently complain when no test suite is present. As
you noted, some sources like GNOME shell extensions are essentially
impossible to test. Also, some long-time contributors reportedly
dislike autopkgtest. Either way, the project relies here on the fact
that having a meaningful testsuite may provide a faster migration from
unstable to testing.

Kind regards
Felix Lechner

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/blob/master/lib/Lintian/Check/Testsuite.pm#L89-91
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/blob/master/tags/m/missing-tests-control.tag



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