General remarks for writing autopkgtests
Hi,
to conserve some discussion happening on our matrix channel[1] I'd like
to summarise some principles how we design autopkgtests:
The test that was written for mrtrix3[2] fails on my side with:
.../tree/debian/tests/run-unit-test: 20: ./run_tests: not found
The reason is that our run-unit-test template is not using the source
directory but rather
AUTOPKGTEST_TMP=$(mktemp -d /tmp/${pkg}-test.XXXXXX)
So the script run_tests inside upstream source is not found.
The rationale is that we like to provide run-unit-test as working
examples for our users at the same time as it can be used for
autopkgtest. So any scripts and data that are needed need to be
installed into the package first. This can usually be done by
using the file debian/examples (see `man dh_installexamples`)
Thus we usually also install the run-unit-test script into the binary
package as /usr/share/doc/PKG/run-unit-test.
The additional advantage of doing so is that you can test your
autopkgtest also in your local system which can help simplifying
debugging. It would be great if you would try this after creating a
new autopkgtest.
A random example how you can install run-unit-test into the package
can be found for instance in the package alien-hunter[3] (its the
debian/docs file - see dh_installdocs). You might like to provide
a debian/README.test file as well.
If you do all this, install the package you created and can run
sh /usr/share/doc/PKG/run-unit-test
successfully you are usually on the safe side that your autopkgtest
works. For debugging reasons it makes sense to comment the line that
cleans up the AUTOPKGTEST_TMP dir (line 10 in our packaging template[4])
and add some `set -x`. This makes debugging of autopkgtest scripts
faster than in running the full test and gives you more power than in
a chroot-jail.
Hope these hints are helpful
Andreas.
[1] https://app.element.io/#/room/#debian-med:matrix.org
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/mrtrix3/-/blob/master/debian/tests/run-unit-test
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/alien-hunter/-/blob/master/debian/docs
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/community/package_template/-/blob/master/debian/tests/run-unit-test#L10
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