• Contact: tech-pkg
• Duration estimate: 3-6 weeks

IMPORTANT: This project was completed by joerg. You may still contact the people above for details, but please do not submit an application for this project.

Right now the pkgsrc packaging for many things does not support running those things' native test suites. One of the reasons for this is that those test suites often depend on additional packages for test infrastructure or test automation. Sometimes those additional depends cause cycles; sometimes they're "only" heavyweight; but fairly often adding them as unconditional BUILD_DEPENDS (or worse, full DEPENDS) has undesirable consequences.

It ought to be possible to have a separate set of TEST_DEPENDS that's brought in only when one is actually intending to run a test suite. This is not entirely trivial (or it would have been done long ago) because it doesn't fit well into the sequence of phases pkgsrc builds happen in. Should there be a separate (and late) phase for TEST_DEPENDS, or a (per-package?) switch in mk.conf to enable test material, or some other scheme? What about packages that need to be installed first before their tests will run? (Yes, ideally these wouldn't exist...)

The first part of this project is: decide how it should work and sell the community on it, er, I mean, reach consensus with the community on the best approach. This (including sorting through all the requirements and miscellaneous desiderata, which are by no means listed completely above) is at least half the work.

The second part of this project is to implement what you've designed, and add support to three or four packages with nontrivial test suites.

(Note: this project description was partly based on loose talk on the subject appearing in PR 50645.)