[libvirt] Scope of the test driver? (Was: Re: [PATCH] test_driver: implement virDomainSendKey)

[Peter Krempa]

On Mon, Jun 03, 2019 at 13:13:14 +0200, Erik Skultety wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 03, 2019 at 12:31:56PM +0200, Peter Krempa wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 03, 2019 at 08:52:55 +0200, Erik Skultety wrote:

[...]

> > I think the problem here is that it's unclear what the purpose of the
> > test driver is supposed to be. Clarifying the purpose first might have
> > positive impact on the design decisions here.
> >
> > So what's the point of the test driver?
> >
> > Is it meant for human interaction, e.g. for application developers or
> > users wanting to test stuff? In that case you probably want to simulate
> > the "worst" behaviour we have, which would be the blocking timeout so
> > that users/devs can see the worst case implications of running such a
> > command.
> 
> I agree and disagree at the same time. The part I disagree with is that anyone
> would be truly interested in seeing how much the API blocks, they'd just want

Well if you are designing an user interface around this it might be
useful to know and experience that this API will block for a while in
certain cases.

Ideally you should be able to figure that out from the docs.

There are also other APIs which can have interresting semantics in some
cases. E.g. in case of the qemu driver all APIs which use the guest
agent may block or fail if the guest agent is stuck or not installed.

Obviously covering all the cases may be hard, thus we want to limit the
scope ...

> to job done and as such the wait doesn't bring any value to that and I agree
> I'd also recommend doing anything related to ^this to be done on dummy VMs as
> you mentioned below, but then again, we're focusing on test driver coverage, so

How something is covered really depends on the purpose and that's
why I asked about the purpose. To me it's not clear what the test driver
is supposed to achieve and thus it's hard to determine whether a given
mock approach makes sense.

> from coverage perspective, we probably want to cover this API too - to some
> degree.

Sure we want to cover it, but to which degree? That's what I want to
clarify. If we do that, answering questions how to do things should be
easier.
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