Subject: Re: [bug#37519] [PATCH v2 2/2] gnu: add iwd.

From: Danny Milosavljevic <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 00:30:21 +0200

Hi,

> > It was missing the kernel module pkcs8_key_parser, as explained in src/pkcs8.conf. Since we can't load it at build time, I disabled the test.

It's fine to do it like that in that case, but just some food for thought:

We often disable tests in cases like that because writing system tests for something like that is annoying if one has to do it manually.

Would it be possible to discover packages which need those kinds of tests (if necessary just specify an "argument" in the package record) and automatically create&run system tests for them?  Guix would then run all the tests in a qemu-system container.

Something like

  $ make TESTS=packages check-system

which would:

* Traverse all the packages with (#:run-tests-as-system-tests? #t)
* Automatically set up a system test to run the tests of all of these packages.  Basically we could just provide guix-daemon inside a qemu guest and build the same derivation again in there, letting it load Linux kernel modules however it wants.

Especially Linux kernel-requiring (or worse, -modifying) tests are otherwise impossible to do.

Long term, I don't feel good excluding all those tests just because they are low-level.

Docs:

>there is no automatic module loading for key type parsers

Why not?  Weird... there's require_module, was it not thought of--or is it inapplicable somehow?