Re: Package test service for GNU maintainers

[John Darrington]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 04:53:52PM +0200, Ludovic Court??s wrote:
     Hello!
     
     As a part of a discussion about ???cool features for GNU maintainers??? at
     the GHM, someone (Andreas, IIRC) suggested having a service (possibly a
     Web service) that would allow maintainers to upload their (pre)release
     tarballs and then get some feedback:
     
       ??? If the package is not available in the distro, it would just say
         ???sorry, your package is not available in the distro, but you can
         help!???.  Something like that.  ;-)
     
       ??? If the package is available, it would do something equivalent to
         ???guix build foo --with-source=foo.tar.gz??? and eventually return the
         build result.
     
         Upon success, it could also return a generated patch that can be
         sent to guix-devel for inclusion.
     
         It could also use something similar to ???guix refresh
         --list-dependent??? to try building dependent packages, or at least
         tell the maintainer to check them.
     
     I think we have most of the tools to do that, and it may be a good way
     to entice GNU maintainers into contributing to Guix.  Since it???s a
     lightweight process, we could suggest to make it a recommendation in the
     maintainer???s guide.
     
     Thoughts?  Who want to give it a go?  :-)
     
I could give it a go.

However there are a couple of things which are of concern.

1. The way you describe it above, would it not be considered SaaS ?

2. By default, guix does not check that out-of-source builds are functional.
   "make distcheck" on the other-hand does.  Do we want to duplicate the 
function
   of "make distcheck"?  Perhaps we do, since I have recently seen a rather bad
   GNU release where it obviously wasn't run.

3. Should we check too that a package behaves sanely when cross-compiling?

4. Some years ago, somebody knocked up a similar "GNU package linter" and ran
   it on all GNU packages.  One maintainer got very shitty about a "deficiency"
   that was detected - started demanding an apology, blah, blah blah ...

J'



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