How to test the debian packages?

Good Morning, Max has brought up the topic of somehow testing the debian packages and I wonder what aspects we need to test it. Ideally we would test: (a) Building a new version of everything against the last packages we have built to find wrong minimum versions. (b) Create source packages and build everything. (c) Try to upgrade services and check something is respawned and the config file is compatible. (a) is a complicated mess. We do add new interfaces, versions to the development version of libraries and we don't want to bump the SO_VERSION and such until we make a release. So this item will always break. (b) Is quite easy. When making a release we should open the changelog with version+1 and not being released and then make nightly source packages and upload them to the OpenSUSE build service and see how it fails. (c) Is possible but a bit tricky again. We need to do this for each service (e.g. nitb and bsc share the same VTY, OML, RSL port and are mutual exclusive). Max is probably aiming for (b) and I think it is not that needed. I tend to make releases and build packages and the breakage is quite small from release to release. I think there would be real value in (c) but that requires some work that we will probably not have time for in Q1. holger