Dear Maintainer,

in order to run autopkgtest on porter machines, I have written a small
proof-of-concept script[1].

This script starts a schroot session, installs autopkgtest and the
package's binary packages into it and then tries to figure out the
required test dependencies in order to install them as well, followed by
running autopkgtest.

It currently tries to figure out the dependencies by capturing the error
output from autopkgtest first, then installing the dependencies, then
running autopkgtest again. I am worried there will be cases without
dependencies or where dependencies are already satisfied by installing
the binary packages (and their dependencies), so autopkgtest will run
twice.

It would helpful if autopkgtest had a mode which basically just checks
whether the test dependencies are satisfied, and if not, print them out,
then exiting before actually running the tests.


Michael

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/mbanck/dd-autopkgtest

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo
Hi Michael, thanks for the suggestion, however I don't think this should
be standard functionality (other autopkgtest maintainers may disagree).

However what you are looking for could by achieved via something like:

$ apt-get satisfy \
  "$(grep-dctrl -F Tests -s Depends -n test_name debian/tests/control)"

where test_name is the test for which you want dependencies to be satisfied.

Is this good enough for your use case?

If you agree on this, I'd like to tag this bug as wontfix and close it.

Cheers,

Paride

Hi,

No, my use-case is a general approach. The idea is that you pass it a
source package and it runs autopkgtest for it, while it installs all the
required packages beforehand. So I don't know the name for the test.

Maybe a more minimal approach would be to just exit if all required
packages are installed (and fail with the current list of missing
packages otherwise). Cause right now if there are no (missing)
dependencies, autopkgtest runs twice which can potentially take a long
time.


Michael