[gentoo-user] Re: Anyone ever emerged dev-libs/boost with FEATURES="test" and finished?

[Lie Ryan <lie.1296@gmail.com>]

On 04/06/10 17:23, Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Tue, 06 Apr 2010 10:11:02 +1000, Lie Ryan wrote:
> 
>> Anyway, I've been thinking about this for some time that turning on
>> FEATURES="test" globally seems quite impractical for many users
> 
> FEATURES=test is not meant to be used by users, it is a developer
> setting, and they would only enable it for packages they maintain and
> then only when they ant to run the tests.

But most developers do not have the resources to test on all
combinations of platforms. If the barrier for FEATURES="test" can be
lowered, then everyone that wants to be a global tester can do it
without sacrificing too muchs (plus they can control how much time they
want to contribute) and this benefits all open-source software as a
whole. Lowering barrier for testing also encourages developers to write
unittest who would otherwise hand-waving it since they now know their
unittest will really be testing the program's true correctness instead
of an platform dependent correctness. Probably enabling "test" by
default is too much to ask though.

>> Due to this problem, I think portage could have a test policy feature so
>> people can have finer control to filter out test suites that they don't
>> want to run. This way globally FEATURES="test" can be more feasible for
>> most users (and probably can sometime be turned on by default).
> 
> You can set features on a per-package basis by putting FEATURES="blah"
> into /etc/portage/env/category/package.