Re: [Autotest] [RFC] KVM test: Ship rss.exe and finish.exe binaries with KVM test

[Uri Lublin <uril@redhat.com>]

On 02/02/2010 01:48 PM, Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues wrote:
> Hi folks:
>
> We're on an effort of streamlining the KVM test experience, by choosing
> sane defaults and helper scripts that can overcome the initial barrier
> with getting the KVM test running. On one of the conversations I've had
> today, we came up with the idea of shipping the compiled windows
> programs rss.exe and finish.exe, needed for windows hosts testing.
>
> Even though rss.exe and finish.exe can be compiled in a fairly
> straightforward way using the awesome cross compiling environment with
> mingw, there are some obvious limitations to it:
>
> 1) The cross compiling environment is only available for fedora>= 11.
> No other distros I know have it.
>
> 2) Sometimes it might take time for the user to realize he/she has to
> compile the source code under unattended/ folder, and how to do it.
>
> That person would take a couple of failed attempts scratching his/her
> head thinking "what the heck is this deps/finish.exe they're talking
> about?". Surely documentation can help, and I am looking at making the
> documentation on how to do it more easily discoverable.
>
> That said, shipping the binaries would make the life of those people
> easier, and anyway the binaries work pretty well across all versions of
> windows from winxp to win7, they are self contained, with no external
> dependencies (they all use the standard win32 API).
>
> 3) That said we also need a script that can build the entire
> winutils.iso without making the user to spend way too much time figuring
> out how to do it. I want to work on such a script on the next days.
>
> So, what are your opinions? Should we ship the binaries or pursue a
> script that can build those for the user as soon as the (yet to be
> integrated) get_started.py script runs? Remember that the later might
> mean users of RHEL<= 5.X and debian like will be left out in the cold.

4) Another option is to make winutils.iso available (somewhere on the web), and 
download it in get_started.py (similar to other iso images used by kvm test).