[gentoo-soc] PMS test suite, weekly report #1

[Michał Górny]

Hello, everyone.

This year, I'm working on the 'PMS test suite' GSoC project. This
projects aims to provide a comprehensive test suite to check whether
a particular Package Manager does comply to the PMS spec.

Though the coding period hasn't started yet, I already write a few
lines of proof-of-concept code and hit the first issues with my
concepts.

Here's a short summary of what I did:
1) finished all the paperwork,
2) created initial git repos on git.overlays.gentoo.org (those starting
with pms-test-suite*),
3) wrote a single proof-of-concept test ebuild, small piece
of the relevant eclass and a small test result receiver.

What I plan to do in the coming week is:
1) create the project homepage (I already pinged ulm on that),
2) consider a way to note the issues arising during the development
and get feedback more efficiently (blog?),
3) get complaints about the solution I chose for test<->runner IPC
(details below).

The first issue I hit were IPC problems. My original concept assumed
using files to handle passing the test output to the test runner
application. Unfortunately, FEATURES=userpriv meant that some
of the ebuild phases are run with limited permissions and a few other
were run on root's accounts.

To handle that gracefully, I would have to chown the necessary
files/directories in pkg_setup(), grabbing the necessary UID/GID
somehow. The amount of hardcoding or guessing involved made me forfeit
that concept in favor of using dbus for IPC.

This means that the main project repo [1] currently provides a simple
dbus service which listens on the system bus for ebuild append_output
calls, and the overlay repo [2] provides two test ebuilds sending
their output through dbus.

[1] http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/pms-test-suite.git;a=summary
[2] http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/pms-test-suite-overlay.git;a=summary

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny