Bug#844455: autopkgtest: Please support additional (local) packages

[Martin Pitt]

Control: retitle -1 Use local packages for source build

Hello Barry,

Barry Warsaw [2016-11-15 17:51 -0500]:
> Occassionally I'm testing a new package version that has new
> dependencies which aren't yet in Debian.  I can build the ITP'd
> packages locally and build the new package version with e.g. sbuild's
> - --extra-package arguments.  Although it's moderately inconvenient to
> add a bunch of debs, it does work.
> 
> But I don't know that autopkgtest has a similar feature.  It would
> need to build the new package with the extra debs and run the tests
> after installing the extra debs.

It has supported running the tests with local debs for a long time:
Just specify any additional ones on the command line. There is no
limitation that the debs you specify actually come from the source you
specify. So with separate sbuild and that you can do this today.

As for building *in* autopkgtest with extra binaries, this doesn't
currently happen indeed; local binaries are only added as an apt
source for the test, but I think it would not hurt to supply them as
build dependencies too.

However, there is another difficulty: autopkgtest currently assumes
--no-built-binaries as soon as you specify any deb on the command
line, as that's usually what you want. For this corner case (build
given source package but use locally built build dependencies) it
would actually need to grow a --built-binaries flag again.

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)