canonical-ci-engineering team mailing list archive

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement <jean-baptiste.lallement@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 15/03/2015 20:39, Thomi Richards a écrit :
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 8:24 AM, Ursula Junque
> <ursula.junque@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:ursula.junque@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>
>     So what solutions might be possible?
>
>
> Sorry for the delay in getting to this.
>
>
> To be honest, I don't like any of the proposed solutions so far - they
> all feel like ugly hacks to me. If we're going to spend energy solving
> the problem, let's make sure we solve it well :D
>
> The root problem, AIUI is that while we can retrieve old images, the
> tools we use to test those images aren't similarly retrievable.
>
> There's several different conceptual angles we can try to solve this
> problem:
>
> 1) We could try and change the Ubuntu archive so it keeps old versions
> around forever. Almost certainly not going to happen.
> 2) We could try and change the phone images so they include the test tools.
>
> #2 seems like a much more feasible goal to me. Has anyone looked at the
> possibility of including the test dependencies in the phone image, but
> disabling them when not in developer mode? I can anticipate several
> concerns with this approach (using up valuable image space for one,
> security for another), but I think we can address those concerns as they
> arise.
>
>
> Thoughts?
Just a thought, not sure how it can be implemented. For each image built 
and published to s-i.u.c, would it be possible to build a custom tarball 
containing the test tools and apply it on top the image?

This custom tarball would be built at the same time than the image and 
would use the same version of the archive (there is a small risk of race 
when a package is updated in the archive between the time the rootfs is 
built and the time the custom tarball is generated)

The advantages would be:
- It exactly matches the version of the image
- You can keep the same history than the images available on s-i.u.c
- It is installed only when testing an image (no impact on production 
images)
- You can load all the required dependencies for your tests.

There are a couple of technical points to solve (how to identify the 
right test deps automatically, scripted way to apply a custom tarball on 
top of an already customized image, what is the impact on testing of 
tainting the image this way, ...) but it sounds feasible.


JB.

--
Jean-Baptiste Lallement
Canonical Services Ltd.
IRC: jibel