On 25/08/2005, at 3:36 PM, Grobian wrote:
Another thing that crossed my mind when going to work this morning:
When people submit bugs for working/new packages, they usually tell it
works fine, or in some cases that they applied a little patch to
get it
working. However, before even thinking of keywording, I want to know
whether the package reasonably works. That means, I want to do
some small
sanity check, or just functional check that the application or library
appears to work as expected. I think you cannot expect any dev to
know
every package in portage, let alone being common with using it. So
I'd
propose to add a little note on the "reporting bugs" section that
asks the
users to -- if they can come up with it:
1) in case of an application tell us how you can test it works:
example,
streamripper, do streamripper http://some.host.com/music path/to/
bla.mp3,
listen to the mp3, it appears to work fine
2) in case of a library tell us what application can be used to
test it,
preferable small and direct: example, libpcre, emerge mp with USE flag
pcre, start mp on a file, press Ctrl-a navigate in the menu to search,
type a regular expression search like .(build|merge|keyword)+,
check it
matches an appropriate string
Definitely, compilation is fine, but you need to have some sort of
runtime testing as well. On the note of libraries, I would think,
rather than keywording libraries that compile, we should wait until
an application that requires them also needs to be keyworded. This
will probably depend on which library it is, but it'd mean that we
have a full deptree for each application, as well as a useful real-
world test case.
Mike Z. [shootingstar]
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