[Lustre-devel] Language choice for Lustre tests

[Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>]

On Wed, 2012-10-24 at 15:05 -0700, Nathan Rutman wrote:
> On Oct 24, 2012, at 1:02 PM, "Gearing, Chris" <chris.gearing@intel.com> wrote:
> 
> > Nathan,
> > 
> > I'm not 100% sure what you are proposing here, your LAD presentation suggested a 'tune-up' of the current test framework rather than a complete re-write. Which of the two are we discussing?
> Both...
> > 
> The requirements on the framework language are more relaxed, but for ease of development and developer sanity, I assume that the framework language should match the test language.  So I'm using the test language as the requirements driver, and to gage community preference for that test language.

Before embarking on building yet another new and custom framework for
Lustre we should evaluate some existing frameworks.  For example, the
Autotest project was specifically designed to test the Linux kernel.
It's open source, looks active, is flexible, and there is detailed
documentation on how to write tests.  Plus it was designed specifically
for testing the kernel so there are likely existing file system tests.

  http://autotest.github.com/

  "Autotest is a framework for fully automated testing. It is
   designed primarily to test the Linux kernel, though it is useful
   for many other functions such as qualifying new hardware. It's an
   open-source project under the GPL and is used and developed by a
   number of organizations, including Google, IBM, Red Hat, and many
   others."

> Based on the responses so far, it seems that there is a fairly clear preference for Python as a test language, and so I'll propose that Python should be used shorter-term to start replacing test-framework.

If we decide the Autotest framework is a good fit then we'll want to
write the tests in python to be consistent with the framework language.
However, for a first cut it looks like you could use the existing bash
tests largely unmodified.

-- 
Thanks,
Brian