packging guidelines and tests...

[Chris Weyl]

Hey all --

I was rather happy to see that the draft perl guidelines I'd worked on
putting together had been taken up and, with some modifications,
adopted by the FPC (thanks spot!).  However, looking over the meeting
minutes, I was caught off guard by a couple comments that had been
made w.r.t. the very weak suggestion of packaging tests.

I'd brought this matter up quite a while ago now, with a rather strong
response by one person on bugs, and a fairly indifferent result on
this list.[1]  I'd articulated why I thought it was a good idea, and
my own desire for _consistency_ in packaging them.  I've tried to be
consistent with that position (e.g. "they can make good docs, and
others may find them useful even when I don't") since then, and really
haven't heard anything at all one way or the other about this since
then.

The one response I've seen about this from someone from the Fedora
perl user community (not including those who serve on the FPC) was
"Some way to run the test suite would cure my last gripe with
replacing CPAN.pm with rpms."[2]  e.g. I don't use them so much as
docs, but I'd really like to run the actual test suite on my boxen.

Soo...  I'm genuinely disinterested in starting Yet Another Fedora
Packaging Flamewar over this. :)  However, if there is a strong and
widespread opposition to cleanly and consistently packaging tests in
%doc, I certainly don't want to be doing that.

However....   I still find it valuable, and can certainly see the
value in being able to run the same tests the buildsys runs against
your installed system.  (e.g. You're setting up a Catalyst app, and
something funky is going on.  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to test
your actual installed base of modules?)  What if:

* tests are split into -test subpackages and discouraged from
wholesale inclusion in %doc (tho still not a blocker)
* installed under a consistent location (say...
%{_libexecdir}/perl_tests/%{cpandist}/ ?), and
* an optional/alternate perl spec template with subpackage -test
predefined was created to help with this?

This might be the cleanest way to satisfy those who'd like to see the
tests distributable as doc, those who'd like to see the test suites
out of %doc, and those who'd like to run them as actual tests.  This
also wouldn't change the status quo much -- we're not talking about
guideline changes or any such, and no one would be required to do
anything.  However, I do think there's a lot of potential value to be
had here, and it's worth exploring :)

                                         -Chris

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-perl-devel-list/2007-June/msg00032.html
[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-perl-devel-list/2007-June/msg00034.html
-- 
Chris Weyl
Ex astris, scientia