Hi Cleber,
Here are my notes from talking about Avocado with various people during
the KVM forum in Lyon last month.
All comments are QEMU oriented.
1) Working offline
Various people complained Avocado requires online access, and they would
like to use it offline.
Maintainer workflow example is:
- run avocado
- hack QEMU, build
- git pull
- build
- hack QEMU
(go offline)
- hack QEMU
- build
- run avocado <- FAILS
Failure is because mainstream added new tests, which got pulled in, and
the user only notice when running avocado again, but offline.
Test example is boot_linux_console.py, which added various tests from
other subsystems, so the maintainer has to disable the new tests
manually to be able to run his previous tests.
Expected solution: skip tests when artifact is not available, eventually
when the --offline option is used
2) Add artifacts manually to the cache
Not all artifacts can be easily downloadable, some are public but
require the user to accept an End User License Agreement.
Users would like to share their tests with the documentation about
where/how to download the requisite files (accepting the EULA) to run
the tests.
2b) Add reference to artifact to the cache
Group of users might share group of files (like NFS storage) and would
like to use directly their remote read-only files, instead of copying it
to their home directory.
3) Provide qemu/avocado-qemu Python packages
The mainstream project uses Avocado to test QEMU. Others projects use
QEMU to test their code, and would like to automatize that using
Avocado. They usually not rebuild QEMU but use a stable binary from
distributions. The python classes are not available, so they have to
clone QEMU to use Avocado (I guess they only need 5 python files).
When running on Continuous Integration, this is overkill, because when
you clone QEMU you also clone various other submodules.
4) Warn the user when Avocado is too old for the tests
Some users tried Avocado following the examples on the mailing list and
the one in some commit's descriptions where we simply show "avocado run
...". They installed the distribution Avocado package and tried and it
fails for few of them with no obvious reason (the .log file is hard to
read when you are not custom to). IIUC their distribution provides a
older Avocado (69?) while we use recent features (72).
We never noticed it because we use 'make check-venv' and do not test the
distrib Avocado. While we can not test all distribs, we could add a
version test if the Avocado version is too old, display a friendly
message to the console (not the logfile).
That it for my notes.
Eduardo/Wainer, are there other topics I forgot?
Regards,
Phil.
