Re: [Autotest] [PATCH] [RFC] KVM test: Major control file cleanup

[Ryan Harper <ryanh@us.ibm.com>]

* Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lmr@redhat.com> [2009-10-28 14:48]:
> Ryan, Michael:
> 
> I absolutely agree that the ability to debug stuff is important, but
> the ability to make things straightforward to use from the web
> interface or cli is also important. A longer term goal is to have our
> test farm and make any developer able to schedule a job on the test
> farm easily and conveniently.
> 
> Having the dictionaries generated on the job debug directory seems
> like a good compromise to me. Also we can come up with a smart way of
> parsing the config file generated by a given control file in a similar
> way we do today with kvm_config.py, it shouldn't be that hard to do
> it... (I hope I won't burn my tongue with this statement).

If I'm understanding things, we are talking about moving the large body
of kvm_tests.cfg test definitions, guest definitions into a "library",
and then moving the requested test config (bottom on kvm_tests.cfg) into
the control file itself which means the autotest webui would be able to
control which tests get run;  I like this idea very well.  My concern
that I mentioned is that as you edit the "library" it can be difficult
to ensure you described exactly which set of tests on which guests you
want to run and kvm_config.py is invaluable in the process of getting it
right.

Why not have kvm_config.py , or some other wrapper generate a
"kvm_tests.cfg" file dynamically from the "library" and the strings from
the control file?  That way we could still debug configuration via
kvm_config.py?  I much perfer this over queueing up jobs in the webiu,
waiting for it to run, checking the results in the DEBUG dir, adjusting,
repeat.


-- 
Ryan Harper
Software Engineer; Linux Technology Center
IBM Corp., Austin, Tx
ryanh@us.ibm.com