[Pkg-octave-devel] Running Octave tests under xvfb

[Rafael Laboissière]

* Rafael Laboissière <rafael at debian.org> [2017-10-17 22:38]:

> * Sébastien Villemot <sebastien at debian.org> [2017-10-17 19:13]:
>>
>> I recently had to disable the use of xvfb in the octave testsuite, 
>> because it was causing crashes at build time (related to the move to 
>> Qt 5) [1].
>
> I guess that this problem will be eventually fixed and xvfb will work 
> with Qt5.
>
>> Hence I think that simply adding gnuplot-nox as a test dependency 
>> would be a better option (also because it drags less additional 
>> dependencies); but I did not verify that it is enough to fix test 
>> failures, so I may be missing something.
>
> This is probably a better solution, but it has the same drawbacks as 
> the xvfb solution, as pointed out by Antonio in the other message, 
> namely that it will add gnuplot-nox dependency to all packages (the 
> majority of them do not need it) and that it will need an upload of 
> autodep8 to stretch-backports in order to have the tests working on 
> ci.d.o.
>
> I will have a try on the solution proposed by Antonio.

After analysing all possibilities, I finally opted to add gnuplot-nox as 
a dependency of octave-autopkgtest.  This is implemented in version 1.5.2 
of octave-pkg-dev, which has been just uploaded to unstable.

The advantage of this solution is that there is no need to change 
ci.debian.net or the individual Octave add-on packages.  The drawback is 
that it adds 3 Mb of binary packages (gnuplot-nox and its dependencies) 
to each autobuild and autopkgtest, but this is minimal compared with the 
size of the Octave-related packages that must be installed anyway.

I will soon upload a new version of octave-stk that takes advantage of 
this change and we will see whether my solution works or not.

Rafael