User:Sam/Arch testing

Notes on arch testing.

Locale
Use the  locale.

A not-insignificant number of test suites assume this US locale. Sometimes the failure is as "simple" as collation issues (e.g. sorting depending on region -- which would only show up if you're using a non-Western locale), but often, tests specifically request en_US.UTF-8, and hence fail immediately when it's not available.

Timezone
Use TZ=UTC.

It's recommended to use a time namespace and set TZ=UTC to avoid unexpected offsets affecting tests.

dbus
Ensure dbus is running.

For OpenRC based chroots, follow OpenRC. Then run before doing any testing.

This is often required for tests on GNOME software but various other desktop bits too. systemd is also known to need dbus running for the full test suite to pass.

Math-related (accuracy) test failures
TODO

See e.g. media-libs/gd/gd-2.3.0.ebuild. libjpeg-turbo may have needed such workarounds in the past?

Increasing difficulty
There are ways to make testing more rigorous. Let's list some of them.

Use conformant /bin/sh
By default, /bin/sh is a symlink to Bash. We can instead replace it with e.g. to find configure scripts (ab)using Bashisms.

Licensing
We can't control what packages we're asked to test. I suggest setting ACCEPT_LICENSE="*" in make.conf to avoid the need for manual intervention, but this may not be acceptable to all arch testers.

REQUIRED_USE
Until GLEP 73 is implemented, we need to keep up a list of common package.use settings.

TODO: add a list/link here to some?