Re: Naming "test only" package variants

[Ludovic Courtès]

Leo Famulari <address@hidden> skribis:

> So far we have a couple package variants that are intended to be used in
> other packages' test suites, and never referenced by the built package.
> This allows us to update the "primary" package more cheaply.
>
> For example, xorg-server and tzdata offer variants like this.
>
> Should we make a special name for these variants? I forgot to update the
> test-only tzdata in this core-updates cycle, but I might have remembered
> if there was a well-known name suffix like 'tzdata-for-tests' or
> something like that.
>
> I ask because I'm about to do the same thing for net-tools.

For Guile we’ve had “guile-2.0/fixed” from Day 1, defined right below
“guile-2.0” (it was not specifically for tests.)  Most of the time it
would be an alias for “guile-2.0”, and sometimes it would differ.

Perhaps we could do the same for the test-only variants?  It’s still
easy to forget to update them, though, but I can’t think of a
bullet-proof method here.

Thoughts?

Besides, the test-only, known-vulnerable variants can be marked as
“hidden” using the ‘hidden-package’ procedure.

Ludo’.