From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Mathieu Othacehe Subject: Re: Testing the installer Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2020 09:02:26 +0100 Message-ID: <87tv4yqxd9.fsf@gmail.com> References: <87o8v8qq59.fsf@inria.fr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::10]:45853) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.90_1) (envelope-from ) id 1irH9l-0007Iq-RZ for guix-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 14 Jan 2020 03:02:34 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1irH9k-0000gv-KZ for guix-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 14 Jan 2020 03:02:33 -0500 In-reply-to: <87o8v8qq59.fsf@inria.fr> List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane-mx.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?= Cc: guix-devel Hello Ludo, That sounds like a nice idea! I guess we can discuss it more deeply during Guix Days, but here are a few thoughts: * Testing from a VM won't cover HW issues with undetected wifi networks and kmscon rendering issues, but could cover most partitioning issues. * This kind of client/server protocol would make even easier to switch to a gtk graphical installer. * Before the next release, it would be nice to fix the "installer always fail when restarted" issue than has been bitten lots of people. Thanks, Mathieu Ludovic Court=C3=A8s writes: > Hello Guix! > > One of the lessons from the 1.0.0 screw-up was that we should test the > graphical installer itself: > > https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/gnu-guix-1.0.1-released/ > > I think we should try to do that before the next release; not doing it > means testing by hand, which also takes a lot of time. > > One idea that I had was that we could change the installer so that it > listens for connections on some pre-defined Unix-domain socket. When it > gets a connection, it would perform a dialog with its client: sent it a > summary of the current form, wait for its choice, and so on. The forms > would thus be unavailable from the keyboard: essentially =E2=80=98run-for= m=E2=80=99 > calls would be replaced by =E2=80=98draw-form=E2=80=99 calls in that mode. > > Our test infrastructure would thus connect (from a marionette) to the > installer and participate in that dialog. It could even take a QEMU > screenshot at each step. > > How does that sound? Am I overlooking things? > > I guess the difficulty will be to represent questions and answers. > > Ludo=E2=80=99.