Today I finally had a good look at what the next steps need to be if
we are to use exeter based test "for real" in the passt repo.

I already have draft series which move a bunch of the simpler tests to
exeter.  But in order to actually use these we need some sort of
runner.  We're not tied to that runner, we can easily change - that's
the whole point of exeter - but we need to have something.

AIUI, Stefano is not happy with the idea of using either Avocado or
Meson as the default which were the runners I initially focused on for
exeter.  I now suggest two more options:

1) Add a tool as part of exeter that will generate a BATS test script
   from an exeter test program.  So you'd do something like:

	$ exetool --bats <exeter_test_program> > foo.bats
	$ bats foo.bats

This should be pretty easy to do, it's basically what I already have
for Avocado support, indeed a little easier.  For reasons internal to
exeter, Python is the obvious choice to implement exetool, but I could
do it in shell if you really don't like that.

2) Hand-roll a minimal exeter runner as part of passt's existing test
   scripts.  I'm thinking you could essentially point our test stuff
   at an exeter program as an alternative to pointing it at a file
   with the existing test DSL.

   This is more work, but still not too bad.  It has the advantage of
   not adding another dependency, and means we could count exeter
   results along with our existing test results in the final summary.
   However, we'd lose parallel execution and filtering.


Stefano, would you be willing to merge patches which add some basic
exeter tests using one of these approaches?  This would probably just
be static checked and build tests at this point, as a
proof-of-concept.

If we can start introducing some exeter tests, the next step would be
to work on the support library stuff for constructing more complex
network environments from namespaces.  I have draft series with this
as well, but I was looking at splitting it into another mini-project
(tentative name "sinte" - Simulated Inter Network Test Environment).

-- 
David Gibson (he or they)	| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you, not the other way
				| around.
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson