Naming "test only" package variants

Naming "test only" package variants

[Leo Famulari]

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So far we have a couple package variants that are intended to be used in
other packages' test suites, and never referenced by the built package.
This allows us to update the "primary" package more cheaply.

For example, xorg-server and tzdata offer variants like this.

Should we make a special name for these variants? I forgot to update the
test-only tzdata in this core-updates cycle, but I might have remembered
if there was a well-known name suffix like 'tzdata-for-tests' or
something like that.

I ask because I'm about to do the same thing for net-tools.

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Re: Naming "test only" package variants

[Ludovic Courtès]

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:

> So far we have a couple package variants that are intended to be used in
> other packages' test suites, and never referenced by the built package.
> This allows us to update the "primary" package more cheaply.
>
> For example, xorg-server and tzdata offer variants like this.
>
> Should we make a special name for these variants? I forgot to update the
> test-only tzdata in this core-updates cycle, but I might have remembered
> if there was a well-known name suffix like 'tzdata-for-tests' or
> something like that.
>
> I ask because I'm about to do the same thing for net-tools.

For Guile we’ve had “guile-2.0/fixed” from Day 1, defined right below
“guile-2.0” (it was not specifically for tests.)  Most of the time it
would be an alias for “guile-2.0”, and sometimes it would differ.

Perhaps we could do the same for the test-only variants?  It’s still
easy to forget to update them, though, but I can’t think of a
bullet-proof method here.

Thoughts?

Besides, the test-only, known-vulnerable variants can be marked as
“hidden” using the ‘hidden-package’ procedure.

Ludo’.