Comment 7 for bug 492931

Hello,

I work upstream for libssh. There is no way to activate the test suite in libssh for two good reasons:
-Libssh actually has no testsuite. The test/ directory is more meant as some code the authors (including me) wrote to test new features, but that code is not maintained and doesn't act as a testsuite. Such testsuite should be implemented, at least partially, with the next big libssh release.
-Even when this testsuite will be implemented, the use of the tests during compilation would not be a good idea in my opinion, because the tests will require a SSH server configured in a certain way. We could see for instances report of failed tests on systems without SSH server, or where the connection to localhost fails for trivial reasons.

I'd also add that libssh is not exactly a cryptographic library. Cryptography is done within libcrypto of libgcrypt depending how libssh is compiled. There are some functions in libssh that are worth unit-testing, like base64-{en|de}coding, Diffie-helman using libbignum, ...
We will try to provide tests that can run for them at compile time in next release.

Feel free to ask me if you have any other question.

Regards,

Aris