Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] Future goals for autotest and virtualization tests

[Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>]

Am 09.03.2012 12:59, schrieb Anthony Liguori:
> On 03/09/2012 05:14 AM, Kevin Wolf wrote:
>> Am 09.03.2012 00:51, schrieb Ademar Reis:
>>> On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 05:21:44PM -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>>>> Plus it's not unconditional: the test runner will report tests
>>>>> SKIPPED if a dependency is not present.
>>>>
>>>> But then the tests aren't run so if most developers didn't have it
>>>> installed, and most tests were written with it, most developers
>>>> wouldn't be running most tests which defeats the purpose, no?
>>>
>>> Part of a TDD approach is to have build and test bots frequently
>>> running tests on multiple platforms with different
>>> configurations.
>>>
>>> You can't expect developers to run all tests all the time.
>>
>> I think this is one of the most important points: Not all developers
>> must run all the tests all the time.
>>
>> Actually, Anthony agreed with me when I said that developers should run
>> some sanity tests for all of qemu and maybe a few more tests for the
>> subsystems they're touching.
> 
> And a small number of randomly chosen test cases.
> 
> We don't want to have test cases that never run under normal circumstances or 
> else they're prone to break.  That's why I've talked a lot about keeping 'make 
> check' time bound.

This sounds horrible. make check results must be reproducible, not
depend on a randomly chosen set. If you do it like this, a passed make
check means exactly _nothing_.

>> I agree that it would be bad to have a
>> autotest dependency for those basic tests that everyone should run and
>> that should take a few minutes at most.
>>
>> For the rest of test cases, however, not everyone needs to run them and
>> I think an external dependency (that is reasonably easy to satisfy) is
>> not a problem there.
> 
> I'd prefer to avoid external dependencies as it just encourages people not to 
> test.  There may be exceptions for certain types of tests, but it should be an 
> exception, not the rule.
> 
>> A test bot would be great, but even if people just
>> run them occasionally by hand, that would already detect bugs that are
>> currently left in the code for months. If maintainers do it before
>> pushing code into master, you'll even catch everything before it goes
>> into master. This is as good as it gets.
> 
> We'll integrate make check into buildbot which currently does look at 
> submaintainer trees.

But make check will never be the full thing. And if you want to
integrate make check into automated testing, then choosing a random
subset of tests for each is an even worse idea than it is anyway.

I believe the only sane thing to do is to distinguish between quick
sanity tests that are run by make check, and a full test suite that is
not run by every developer, but ideally by some test bots.

Kevin