[Avocado-devel] Implement fetch-assets command line

[Lukáš Doktor]

Dne 26. 09. 19 v 17:37 Cleber Rosa napsal(a):
> 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.
> 

Well one of the solutions were to not to include test setup in the timeout. I can see a benefit in having CI image with those files already cached, where the fetch-assets command might be handy. But if your goal is to always download the assets before suite execution I think you're better off with multiple timeouts.

Anyway this is just my opinion, I haven't followed the discussion thoroughly. I'm mentioning it here because static parsing is always a pain, usually doesn't cover all scenarios and might lead to confusion. Still in some cases it's pretty useful so definitely you're free to go. I just wanted to know your motivation so I can better understand what needs to be supported in the initial version and what is the ultimate goal for the "final" version.

Regards,
Lukáš

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