Re: Testing the installer

[Mathieu Othacehe]

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 Courtès 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 ‘run-form’
> calls would be replaced by ‘draw-form’ 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’.