Hi,

I wanted to put out this question about our Fedora Haskell packages.

Currently about 31 of our packages have their testsuites turned on.
(I don't have figures for how many (of our) packages actually have testsuites: the rest are basically turned off due to missing test library dependencies.)

I think due to a patch I applied to our ghc-8.2.2 to workaround issues with abi-depends, it happened at the end of Feb building unsubpackaged ghc-type-process, which enabled the testsuite causing its package hash to change (Fedora subpackaged libs don't run their testsuites). :-(
(I think deleting the abi-depends field from every package .conf would fix this but that would require rebuilding everything and patching Cabal. Well a hack could be to add an RPM file trigger to do this, but I am wary of doing that.)

So first of all please be careful if rebuilding package-versions for F28 not to toggle testsuites on or off. If we ship ghc-8.4 in F29 then I think this issue will be gone, since it no longer generates and ignores abi-depends metadata.

But the bigger question I wanted to ask is: how worthwhile is it to run the testsuites of our Haskell libraries in Fedora? I often feel the testsuites are an extra maintenance burden which we could probably not worry about in general - it would also simplify our spec files if we didn't need to worry about them. They could be enabled optionally by opt in - I am happy to add a "--test" option to cabal-rpm for packages that want to run their tests.

Thoughts?

Jens