Re: Build failure tooling improvements

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 03/21, Rob Whitlock wrote:
> I occasionally run into the issue that a program builds but crashes on startup. A suggestion would be to have some sort of smoke test that runs the program and checks for that sort of thing. That would probably be package-specific though, and would likely have overlap with any test target that might already be present.

I think this is a good idea.  Homebrew has that; a formula can have a
"test" block:

  https://docs.brew.sh/Formula-Cookbook#add-a-test-to-the-formula

For example, the rclone.rb formula has such a test:

  https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/r/rclone.rb

As you can see, it's written by the developer who created the formula,
not the developer of the software package being built, and it just tries
to test some basic functionality to see if the app actually runs and
works.  It's *not* a wrapper around "make test" (or similar) that would
run the test suite of the software package being built.

For pkgsrc to get this, either the existing "test" target would need to
be renamed to something else, or this functionality would of course need
its own new target.

Lewis