Subject: Re: [bug#36404] [PATCH 0/6] Add 'guix deploy'.

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2019 14:53:53 +0200

Hi!

Christopher Lemmer Webber <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Jakob L. Kreuze writes:

[...]

>> There are two things in this patch series that I'd like comments on in
>> particular.
>>
>> First, I still haven't figured out the whole testing situation. The
>> tests, as of now, spin up a virtual machine, create a machine instance,
>> deploy that to the virtual machine, and then make assertions about
>> changes made to the system. These tests were originally in the system
>> test suite as they deal with virtual machines, but I've since moved it
>> into the normal Guix test suite because of how much needs to be done on
>> the host side -- I spent an absurd amount of time trying to fit a call
>> to 'deploy-machine' into a derivation that could be run by the system
>> test suite, but I just wasn't able to make it work. I'm hoping someone
>> will have thoughts about how we can test 'guix deploy'. Should we have
>> them disabled by default? Is there some way to implement them in the a
>> system test suite that I've overlooked? Should the tests be included at
>> all?
>
> Ludo, do you have comments?  I suspect this is up your area of expertise.

As Ricardo wrote, I think that’s too much work to do in “make check”.
Plus this would only run when a “host store” is available, as we can’t
reasonably build QEMU and everything in $builddir/test-tmp.

So I feel that the system test suite is a better fit, but I don’t fully
understand the limitations you hit, Jakob.

Do you still have a draft of a system test that you wrote and/or notes
about what went wrong?

Ludo’.