[Avocado-devel] Implement fetch-assets command line

[Cleber Rosa]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 09:17:06AM -0300, Willian Rampazzo wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 5:09 AM Amador Pahim <amador at pahim.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 9:49 AM Lukáš Doktor <ldoktor at redhat.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hello guys,
> > >
> > > what a nice discussion. But before you start, what lead you to pick this card? It's one of the nice-to-have-ideas card and we have plenty of well-defined-and-useful cards that also needs attention, so unless you have a real-world usage, I'd probably suggest to focus on something you can directly benefit from. (unless you have other interest in eg. learning something, or other kind of interest).
> >
> > Fair point. A RFC would do some good here.
> >
> 
> My fault not bringing the reason for this card up to the discussion.
> As far as I'm concerned, qemu had some problems with tests timing out
> while downloading huge images with restricted bandwidth in their CI.
> There was a discussion where Cleber was involved in the qemu-devel
> list about it and a workaround was to disable those tests. One of the
> options discussed was to have a command that would fetch the assets
> prior to the test start, or not related to the test, so the download
> does not count on test timeout. This is, yet, one from the various
> requests related to assets that would benefit them. As qemu tests
> consist of single string parameters on their fetch_asset calls, with
> at least the simple parser item introduced to Avocado, qemu can
> re-enable those tests that were failing due to asset download timing
> out the test. Cleber may have some more details about the whole
> discussion.

You've summarized it pretty well.  Basically many (most?) tests are
not about downloading or even extracting files.  They're really about
performing some action with those files (which we call assets).

There are many possible ways to attempt to solve that problem, and
we're basically trying to find the ones that provide the best
developer experience, which usually means requiring the least amount
of boiler plate code.

- Cleber.