Please exercise more care (testing packages both build and install)

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

Hi Sarah,

Sarah Hobbs wrote:
> Good afternoon developers, on this fine and sunny afternoon!
> 
> Recently, my attention was pointed to bug #273015 [1], about a
> metapackage being uninstallable.  On closer inspection, this turned out
> to be a merge request, actioned 9 days ago.

As the sponsor of the upload, I apologize for this mistake. I'll follow up in
the new bug report and make sure everything is fixed ASAP.

> Consequently, I must ask whether these were even test built.  They
> certainly weren't all checked for installability, as the errors would
> have become immediately obvious.  [2]

I did test-build them. I didn't test-installed them though, as I didn't though
there was anything to test in a metapackage (no binaries to run, no libraries...
and I didn't realize the dependencies were what I should be checking).

For my defense I have to say I test-build, test-install and test-run other
packages, so this isn't a common case.

> Consequently, I'd like to remind all universe contributors, MOTUs, Core
> Developers, Sponsors, and anyone else submitting and actioning patches,
> to check that their resulting packages build, and install, before
> uploading.  Feature freeze is a time where we're attempting to stabilise
> the archive - so should not be introducing more breakage.

I'll be more careful in the future.

> For those of you who use pbuilder to build packages, please note that
> there are pbuilder hooks that will test installability for you.  This is
> vaguely mentioned in our guide [3], and more thoroughly in the Pbuilder
> Users Manual [4].  Sbuild may have similar features, but I do not use it
> myself.

That's certainly useful, thanks for the tip!

Again sorry for the mistake,
Emilio

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