Re: [PATCH] xfstests-bld: add f2fs support

[Jaegeuk Kim <jaegeuk@kernel.org>]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 11:22:49AM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 09:11:13PM -0800, Jaegeuk Kim wrote:
> > 
> > IIUC, I guess it'd be okay if VM installed that as a package. I tried to add
> > f2fs-tools repo likewise fio, I could't find /sbin/mkfs.f2fs, even if it was
> > installed into bld/sbin/. Instead, bld/sbin/* were copied into xfstests/bin/
> > in VM, which enables to execute mkfs.f2fs globally through $PATH.
> 
> Ah, I see what you mean; I thought you were talking about your local
> f2fstools git repo, and not changes you've made to your local
> xfstests-bld repo.
> 
> The reason why xfsprogs is installed in xfstests/bin is that
> historically, xfstests needed some of the xfsprogs tools (no matter
> what file system type you were testing), and the xfsprogs installed in
> Debian and Ubuntu was too old or didn't install all of the utilities
> that xfstests required.
> 
> However, I have not tried to build the file system utilities for other
> file systems in xfstests-bld --- and this includes e2fsprogs.  My goal
> is to allow xfstests-bld to support a large number of file systems,
> and it doesn't scale to build all file system utilities in
> xfstests-bld.  Also, most of the time, the file system utilities tend
> to move at a slower pace, and the requirements for needing a newer
> file system utility than what is shipped in the distribution is rarer.
> 
> I have sometimes built a newer version of e2fsprogs as a Debian
> package, and installed it into the VM.  These days, what I tend to do
> when that's been necessary is to build a new Debian package for
> jessie-backports, and upload it to the jessie-backports repository, so
> everyone can use the same binary package.
> 
> I guess I don't have any objections to allowing people to put locally
> compiled versions of the utilities in /root/xfstests/sbin and rely on
> the PATH to use that version in preference to the /sbin/mkfs.f2fs
> version of the utilities.  As far as adding the ability to download
> and build local versions of f2fstools in the upstream xfstests-bld, I
> guess I could accept that so long as it's optional, and not turned on
> by default.  The main issue here is that if i have a half dozen file
> system-specific utilities included in xfstests-bld, which were all
> enabled for download by default, it would increase the build time of
> xfstests-bld significantly, so it doesn't scale.  I'd much prefer to
> see newer versions of the utilities (if necessary) in
> debian-backports.

Agreed to all of them. What I tried to set up actually was to test the latest
f2fs-tools in prior to release out. Anyway, I agree it'd be good to add an
option to select local fs utilities through config.custom to avoid the scaling
problem.

I realize that xfstests-bld is really great to test multiple kernel versions.
I guess it can be quite doable to test arm-based kernel as well, as I can see
cross compile environment.

Thank you for sharing this tool.

> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 						- Ted