Things we ought to do to improve our packaging

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 11:19 PM, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
> Because automatic builds are a bog-standard quality assurance mechanism
> that I shouldn't even have to explain. Yes, Gentoo is very shiny and
> apparently makes this especially easy... so why oh why are you
> resisting?

So upon further reflection, we have had problems in Gentoo with the
test suite. We make available test suite runs from the build process
so users can get a semblance of proof that the software as built
actually works. But, (a) tests often get run as root, and that isn't
really supported in the test suite, (b) we run tests in a sandbox that
IIRC causes problems when running tests in parallel. Therefore we
currently (1) disable lots of tests we know don't work in these
circumstances, and (2) I don't run the tests as often as I should
because we run the tests in serial and it's so slow.

So if we had ways of improving our test suite experience, that would be win.

Cheers,

Dirkjan