Taskbot and Automation

[Fabian Deutsch]

Am Dienstag, den 28.05.2013, 07:49 -0600 schrieb Tim Flink:
> > >  - do some investigation to be somewhat sure that we're not
> ignoring
> > >    existing tools (autotest is first on my list, beaker is
> probably
> > >    worth exploring a bit)
> > 
> > This comparison will not be easy, the tools are large with lots of
> > features. It might be beneficial to include their developers (e.g.
> > lmr from autotest) in the discussions what we need and what the
> tools
> > can offer. We have a lot of experience with autotest, but I somewhat
> > expect that there are many more features that we haven't even tried
> > to discover.
> 
> Yeah, I have no illusions that the comparison will be straight
> forward.
> The systems have very little in common outside of being written in
> python and the fact that from a high level, they both execute jobs. I
> suspect that a lot of it is going to come down to how much we want
> flexibility.
> 
> Autotest is by far more featureful than buildbot from a test execution
> perspective - it already has a test running system, it already has
> concepts of more complicated results and supports jobs on remote and
> multiple remote systems (probably more, those are the ones that come
> to
> mind right away). At the moment, I think buildbot is a better fit for
> the idea of a loosely coupled system of components joined by json and
> rest but creating such a system will likely require more initial work
> to fill some gaps in functionality.

Hey,

I'm Fabian and writing to this list for the first time! I'm currently
working on oVirt (Node) (sub-)project which is a slimmed down Fedora (or
CentOS). Part of my $dayjob is to bring some test automation to oVirt
Node.

After this short introduction let me drop my two words. First I'd say
that the clean separation between the different actors is future proof.
I also agree on the roles of actors themselves and how they interact.
But as said elsewhere - the devil is in the details.

Now the last paragraph and tools.
In the oVirt Node we are using gerrit, jenkins and igor [0]. Igor is the
component which picks up an ISO and assigns it to some machine (real or
virtual, freshly created or existing one). Igor is then offering a
testsuite to client which can pull it and performing a number of
"steps" (testcases) on the host and reports them back to Igor. That's
the basic procedure [1]. Igor was designed to work in par with Jenkins,
that means - like in your idea - it is designed to push the results of
the runs to some remote "result-bin".
I'm just mentioning Igor here because I believe that it solves some of
the problems that you'll be facing (in particular setting up and
preparing a real machine and running a number of steps on it) - so -
IIUIC - best matching the role of an Executor.

But I suppose a new thread - as you suggested - is the best place to
discuss the tools.

Greetings
fabian

[0] https://gitorious.org/ovirt/igord
[1]
http://dummdida.tumblr.com/post/51492048387/testing-ovirt-node-in-4min-video