Creating autoqa-watchers sub-package?

Kamil Paral kparal at redhat.com
Tue Sep 14 07:53:14 UTC 2010


----- "James Laska" <jlaska at redhat.com> wrote:

> Greetings,
> 
> As autoqa is currently packaged, all tests, watchers, configs and
> cronjobs are included in the main autoqa package.  This works fine
> except for a minor annoyance.  Anytime you install 'autoqa', unless
> you
> are actually scheduling jobs, you needed comment or remove the
> watcher
> notification /etc/cron.d/autoqa.  This gets annoying the more I
> deploy
> autoqa.  
> 
> I'd like propose moving the watcher scripts and cronjob into a
> sub-package (see attached patch for detail).
> 
> When most people install 'autoqa', they want the test library and
> tests.
> This won't change that behavior.  The only change will be for anyone
> setting up a test server.  I'll need to update the existing wiki
> documentation to note installing 'autoqa-watchers' when setting up a
> test server [1].
> 
> Comments/concerns/ideas?

Splitting is a good idea. Just a remark: If you put watchers (i.e. hooks)
into a separate package but leave autoqa harness in the original package,
then the autoqa harness can't be used (it doesn't work separately, it needs
hook.py files to operate). So people won't be able to just try and run some
test, even manually.

I see several ways:
1. Let's create autotest and autotest-client packages. Autotest-client will
contain only stuff really required for clients, i.e. autotest and autoqa 
library. Autotest package will contain the rest. Easy to deploy, but people
that want to experiment with it must install all (and disable cron jobs).

2. Your idea, autotest and autotest-watchers packages. Easy to deploy, people
still can't just run a test without the full installation. But this time they
can at least have a look at the tests' source code.

3. Creating autotest and autotest-server packages. Autotest-server will 
contain just the crontab file. Silly? :)

4. What about commenting out the crontab file by default? If someone really
wants to deploy a server, he will just uncomment the file (and maybe tweak
the settings anyway). That file is left intact on upgrade, so that shouldn't
be a problem, it's a one-time task. And we will document that on the wiki
(the same way we have now documented that everyone not wanting to run a server
should comment out that file).


I would like to provide people easy way to try and play with autoqa. Although
the last solution seems to be extremely simple, it seems to work well enough.
Would that help you too? Or do you prefer another way? What do you think?



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