Re: IDEA: missing-tests-pypi-error? condition

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hi,

Munyoki Kilyungi <me@bonfacemunyoki.com> writes:

> "jgart" <jgart@dismail.de> aliandika:
>
>> Hi Guixers,
>>
>> I was recently reviewing a patch by a contributor and was discussing the 
>> notion of preferring upstream to PyPI when tests are missing on PyPI.
>>
> What's the policy on this.  Shouldn't we prefer
> upstream over PyPI?  Sometimes, PyPI versions lag
> behind upstream versions.

There's no written policy about it at this time, but I think it's common
knowledge in Guix that we try hard to:

1. Unbundle dependencies (that one is documented)
2. Run test suites (that one isn't)

We could hint at this globally in the contributing section, and perhaps
expound with more specific details in the Python Modules contributing
section, mentioning that when the PyPI source archive lacks tests,
fetching from the git repository should be preferred.

Another thing we could do is default to fetch from git for the Python
importer.

>> WDYT if we also signalled a special condition when there are missing tests 
>> in PyPI?
>>
> I posit that this should be the responsibility of
> the contributor.  Adding extra glue can add
> unnecessary complexity.

I think an error would help catching this situation; the
gnu-build-system would fail running 'make check' when there is no check
target for example, but in the Python world, running 'python setup.py
test' often succeeds even 0 tests were run, which is easy to overlook.
I'm not sure how easy it'd be to check for missing tests though.

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim