autopkgtest support in Debian: a more optimistic view
September 06, 2025
Yesterday I posted
about the history, in numbers, of the support for autopkgtest in the Debian
archive. I had analyzed the presence of a Testsuite: field in source
packages, from wheezy to trixie, and noticed a slowdown in the growth rate of
autopkgtest support, in proportional terms. In each new release, the
percentage of packages declaring a test suite grew less than in the previous
release, for the last 4 releases.
A night of sleep and a rainy morning later, I come back with a more optimistic view, and present to you the following data, expanded from the raw data:
| Release year | Release | Yes | No | Total | Δ Yes | Δ No | Δ Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | wheezy | 5 | 17170 | 17175 | -- | -- | -- |
| 2015 | jessie | 1112 | 19484 | 20596 | 1107 | 2314 | 3421 |
| 2017 | stretch | 5110 | 19735 | 24845 | 3998 | 251 | 4249 |
| 2019 | buster | 9966 | 18535 | 28501 | 4856 | -1200 | 3656 |
| 2021 | bullseye | 13949 | 16994 | 30943 | 3983 | -1541 | 2442 |
| 2023 | bookworm | 17868 | 16473 | 34341 | 3919 | -521 | 3398 |
| 2025 | trixie | 21527 | 16143 | 37670 | 3659 | -330 | 3329 |
A few observations:
- Since stretch, we have been consistently adding
autopkgtestsupport to close to 4,000 packages on each release, on average. - Since buster, the number of packages without
autopkgtestsupport has decreased in the hundreds. - On average, each release has 3,400 packages more than the previous, while
also bringing 4,000 extra packages with
autopkgtestsupport. I have the following hypotheses for this:- a large part of new packages are added already with
autopkgtests; - a smaller but reasonably large number of existing packages get
autopkgtests added on each release.
- a large part of new packages are added already with
All in all, I think this data show that Debian maintainers recognize the usefulness of automated testing and are engaged in improving our QA process.