Bug#763541: pkg-perl-autopkgtest: environment variables for the smoke test

[Niko Tyni]

Package: pkg-perl-autopkgtest
Version: 0.17
Severity: wishlist

Dear team, please advise :)

The libapache2-mod-perl2 package test suite needs to have
APACHE_TEST_EXTRA_ARGS set to work in our environment. We don't currently
have a way to configure that for the autopkgtest 'smoke' test.

This ties nicely with us setting AUTOMATED_TESTING and
NONINTERACTIVE_TESTING by default: having a way to override those would
be at least elegant, even if packages breaking because of them [1]
could be considered buggy.

The reason I'm filing this instead of rushing to implement
d/t/pkg-perl/env-smoke is that I'm torn between sticking to just
environment variable initialization vs. offering a generic pre-testing
script that could arrange other things as well.

The easiest way to implement d/t/pkg-perl/env-smoke would be to source it
into the shell, which would make it more generic (at least if we promise
to keep doing that) but would make the name misleading. In that case I
think it should be called d/t/pkg-perl/pre-smoke or something like that.

However, I've become sort of wary of offering executable configuration
files.  The trend in Debian seems to be towards declarative configuration
with the executable part centralized so that it's easy to keep updated.
The commonly cited example of this is dh9 short debian/rules.

Having an executable pre-smoke hook would help at least libchart-perl,
where Axel had to patch the source a bit to work around the lack of a
place where to call 'mkdir'. I'm sure we will hit a few other special
cases later.

I note that we could have both, and document that 'pre-smoke' is only
for the really weird edge cases. Or we could implement 'env-smoke' now
and leave 'pre-smoke' for later, which I guess is the normal Debian
way of not deciding anything :)

I'm sort of inclined to take the last option (env-smoke now, pre-smoke
could come later) but I would welcome opinions on this.

[1] my notes have these regressions due to setting AUTOMATED_TESTING:

 libb-hooks-endofscope-perl # AUTOMATED_TESTING requires Devel::Hide
 libmysql-diff-perl # t/94metatest.t AUTOMATED_TESTING used for author tests
 libtext-greeking-perl # t/97_meta.t AUTOMATED_TESTING used for author tests
 libdevel-dumpvar-perl # t/97_meta.t AUTOMATED_TESTING used for author tests
 liborlite-statistics-perl # t/97_meta.t AUTOMATED_TESTING used for author tests
 libppi-html-perl # t/97_meta.t AUTOMATED_TESTING used for author tests
 libtext-diff-perl # t/97_meta.t AUTOMATED_TESTING used for author tests

but we work around all but the two first ones because we zap t/97_meta.t
away nowadays.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org