[Freeipa-devel] Thoughts on tests (unit, integration, self-test)

[Rob Crittenden]

Jason Gerard DeRose wrote:
> This is a brain dump on all things related to the freeIPA tests included
> in its source tree...
> 
> One of my big goals with the Python code I've written for v2 is to make
> freeIPA easier to test (especially easier to quickly test as you code,
> while running everything in-tree).  This is a challenging problem
> because running full blown freeIPA requires some fairly invasive
> configuration changes... you don't want to make these changes to your
> workstation unless you're actually part of an IPA realm, and if you're
> part of an IPA realm, you don't want to run these tests against (and
> possibly break) a production realm.

[ snip ]

I generally agree with this approach, particularly when it comes to 
separating the integration tests from the unit tests. I like the idea of 
selftests but I haven't yet wrapped my mind around it. I keep thinking 
of Jurassic park where you are only testing what you are expecting and 
therefore all tests pass (even though there are raptors about to bite you).

I think we should have 2 types of integration testing too: lite and 
full. Lite testing would utilize the python-litexml.py script and a full 
test would test against Apache running the XML-RPC module. In theory 
they should work the same way, this will confirm the theory. It should 
be as simple as changing a config option on the client so running one vs 
the other should be straightforward. It might be nice to be able to run 
this with a remote IPA server as well as a local one too.

So I think you are on the right track here, we just need to flesh out 
what the SelfTest might look like. Would it essentially be one test 
per-method or would we be able to fake negative testing too (to test 
throwing exceptions)?

I gather you envision this as separate make-test scripts (or make targets)?

I'm a little less jaded when it comes to setting up an environment. I 
drop and re-create my IPA server on an almost daily basis it seems 
testing one thing or another. Running in a VM is a good idea though 
simply because IPA is so invasive in overwriting config files.

Great start.

rob