Re: [PATCH v6 0/4] New proof-of-concept based exeter tests

[Stefano Brivio <sbrivio@redhat.com>]

On Mon,  1 Sep 2025 14:25:11 +1000
David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:

> Here's a new approach to building passt tests with exeter.  This new
> one no longer uses Avocado in the default case, although it would
> still be possible to manually run the exeter based tests with Avocado.
> 
> Here's another draft of my work on testing passt with Avocado and the
> exeter library I recently created.  It includes Cleber's patch adding
> some basic Avocado tests and builds on that.
> 
> For now this only does simple tests, to show how the integration could
> work.  It adds some new trivial "smoke tests" and converts the linter
> and build checks to exeter.  More complex tests will require building
> the sinte/pesto library we've discussed.  A lot of the work for that
> already exists in my earlier exeter test series, but it will need some
> rework to split it into a separate component.
> 
> v6:
>  * Use exeter's new metadata support to print nicer test names

Thanks, it looks much more readable now.

And to me it looks ready to merge, but I hit something during testing
that I'm not quite sure how to solve, assuming it can be considered an
issue at all.

Initially, I hadn't upgraded my local copy of exeter, so even smoke
tests would fail, until it occurred to me that of course I needed to
drop the 'exeter' directory and 'make exeter' again. It's an issue we
conceptually already have with mbuto (even though it didn't get
breaking changes for months now) and with Podman to some extent.

With exeter, I guess we're going to hit that kind of issue pretty
frequently at least in the near future. So I was wondering: should we
enforce some form of up-to-date check from test/Makefile?

I'm personally fine without it and, given that I plan to update
test/README.md soon anyway ('make' under test/ is not mentioned at
all), I can mention this kind of problem as well, so it shouldn't be a
big deal for others. But I wanted to know if you have thoughts or
proposals on the matter, before applying this.

-- 
Stefano