Re: [PATCH/RFC] test: run static checkers with Avocado and JSON definitions

[Stefano Brivio <sbrivio@redhat.com>]

Not a review, just two remarks:

On Fri, 5 Jul 2024 21:35:28 +1000
David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:

> > [...]
> 
> So, you can run the tests either with run_avocado, or running Avocado
> directly?
> 
> > The installation of Avocado itself is left to users, given that the
> > details on how to install it (virtual environments and specific
> > tooling) can be a very different and long discussion.  
> 
> Right... if the required Avocado version was already packaged in
> latest Fedora and/or Debian, I'd have no qualms about that.  It looks
> like you require a very new one though, which makes me a little
> nervous about requiring that complex installation.  I guess if it's
> pip installable that helps.  Though if I recall on Debian even that
> requires some venv setup.  Eventually I think we'll want a README for
> Avocado installation, or better yet make targets that will install it
> automatically in a local venv.

I plan to try this out on Debian and report back -- I didn't have time
yet. Indeed, it would help to have all the dependencies packaged because
it would be really beneficial if we could run the upstream tests also as
automated package testing, e.g. for Debian it's autopkgtest:
  https://wiki.debian.org/ContinuousIntegration/autopkgtest

The current test suite has all the dependencies packaged on (at least)
Debian and Fedora, minus neper (https://github.com/google/neper), but
tests will be skipped if those tools are not available.

> > [...]
> >
> > +++ b/test/avocado/static_checkers.json
> > @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
> > +[
> > +    {
> > +        "kind": "exec-test",
> > +        "uri": "make",
> > +        "args": [
> > +            "clang-tidy"
> > +        ]
> > +    },
> > +    {
> > +        "kind": "exec-test",
> > +        "uri": "make",
> > +        "args": [
> > +            "cppcheck"
> > +        ]
> > +    }
> > +]  
> 
> Looks pretty reasonable to me, at least for these simple cases.  It
> would be nice to have comments, but IIUC that's one of the things
> notably missing from json :/,

You could use HJSON (https://hjson.github.io/), or a subset of it, for
example with just comments. We're using it like that in seitan, because
that's what Parson supports, example:
  https://seitan.rocks/seitan/tree/demo/routes.hjson

-- 
Stefano