Re: [PATCH] test: Make handling of shell prompts with escapes a little more reliable

[Stefano Brivio <sbrivio@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 7 Dec 2023 12:09:26 +1100
David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 04, 2023 at 10:54:33AM +0100, Stefano Brivio wrote:
> > On Thu, 23 Nov 2023 12:52:53 +1100
> > David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:
> >   
> > > When using the old-style "pane" methods of executing commands during the
> > > tests, we need to scan the shell output for prompts in order to tell when
> > > commands have finished.  This is inherently unreliable because commands
> > > could output things that look like prompts, and prompts might not look like
> > > we expect them to.  The only way to really fix this is to use a better way
> > > of dispatching commands, like the newer "context" system.
> > > 
> > > However, it's awkward to convert everything to "context" right at the
> > > moment, so we're still relying on some tests that do work most of the time.
> > > It is, however, particularly sensitive to fancy coloured prompts using
> > > escape sequences.  Currently we try to handle this by stripping actual
> > > ESC characters with tr, then looking for some common variants.
> > > 
> > > We can do a bit better: instead strip all escape sequences using sed before
> > > looking for our prompt.  Or, at least, any one using [a-zA-Z] as the
> > > terminating character. Strictly speaking ANSI escapes can be terminated by
> > > any character in 0x40..0x7e, which isn't easily expressed in a regexp.
> > > This should capture all common ones, though.
> > > 
> > > With this transformation we can simplify the list of patterns we then look
> > > for as a prompt, removing some redundant variants.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>  
> > 
> > I didn't forget about this one, but I had unrelated test failures which
> > I wasn't sure about. This is actually fine though. Applying soon.  
> 
> I don't think there's any particular need to make a release for it,
> but it would be nice to get this in the main git tree, so I don't have
> to keep awkwardly carrying it about to test my other branches.

Okay, merged just this one without re-testing.

-- 
Stefano