Re: [PATCH v5 0/4] RFC: New proof-of-concept based exeter tests

[David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>]

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On Wed, Aug 20, 2025 at 10:40:48PM +0200, Stefano Brivio wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Aug 2025 20:54:52 +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.
> > 
> > v5:
> >  * Updated according to Stefano's review
> >    - Fixed a number of whitespace errors
> >    - Improved many comments and variable names to make things clearer
> >  * New patch adding parallel test execution with BATS
> >  * Improved autodetection of exeter tests using "exetool probe"
> 
> This works on my setup and looks good to me, I just have two comments:
> 
> - test names are still the same as before (not exactly descriptive, say,
>   'make_passt'). I already reported this on v4, I'm not sure what was
>   your conclusion about it

Sorry, I missed that comment on v4.

exeter test ids are by design machine-friendly identifiers more than
they are human-friendly names or descriptions.  There are a few
reasons for that:

 * The ids need to be passed around between test and runner both on
   the command line and via stdio.  Limiting them to characters that
   are identifier friendly in most languages significantly reduces the
   chances of screwing up quoting.

 * In some existing Python cases, and maybe more language cases in
   future, the ids are auto-generated, e.g. for a matrix or
   composition of tests.  That works more naturally for
   identifiers than names/descriptions.

 * Identifiers are more amenable to structured formatting grouping
   related tests together, which is useful for filtering out groups of
   test by glob/regexp.

 * I like having a succinct id to refer to tests by rather than a
   waffly English description

I'm not opposed to having an (optional) human-readable name or
description for tests in addition to the id.  It would complexify the
exeter protocol, of course, which I'm trying to keep super simple.
Then again, I have several other things in mind that would need
per-test metadata, so it's probably is worth it.

> - I didn't check (yet) what happens when I run this as ./ci (for
>   example, from the pre-push hook), if generated web links are still
>   okay. I'll do that soon unless you can have a look first

I don't really know how to check that.  I don't think there's any
reason it wouldn't work.

-- 
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

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