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David,

All the issues you have pointed out are definitely valid and need to be
resolved.  I think all t of these have been discussed in the ongoing effort
to improve Upstream CI.  The suggestion of merging the tests repo has been
brought up before with some debate.  I would like to point out that we also
have a CI repo that is separate as well that is also part of testing and CI.

The current approach to improvements are described in
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15YobCIUFMEvdNIGem0CJ_g30hJY4YH5Lr6ty7_8ASPY/edit
It takes the approach of trying to understand and clean up what currently
exists and solve he issues of test maintenance, debugging failures, and
local execution of CI tests.  I think all of these can be resolved to
various degrees without merging repos.  That is not an argument against the
idea but a preference to do what we can that is not dependent on where the
code/tests lives.

Your point 2 is the most compelling to me for merging repos,  Having tests
committed along with new features would be a great place be.  Currently I
don't see many tests being committed, unit, manual verification, or
automation.  Maybe I am missing them (can't review every PR).  I would like
to understand if the state of having separate test repos is a factor in not
getting more tests with code changes, or if the other issues are really the
cuplrit.  I suspect the later because I have seen 100% code coverage
through integration tests being committed separately along with code
changes when integration tests were in a separate repo (unit tests in repo
with code).

That's my two cents.  Thank you for reaffirming that the issues we
identified are still issues and that we really need to put more effort in
to resolve them.



On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 8:27 AM David Gibson <david at gibson.dropbear.id.au>
wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 10:49:34AM +0100, Christophe de Dinechin wrote:
> >
> >
> > > On 15 Jan 2021, at 04:29, David Gibson <david at gibson.dropbear.id.au>
> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > I'm a pretty recently started Kata contributor.  One of many things I
> > > found frustrating when I started working on Kata was the way the code
> > > was split into a whole batch of repositories.  I'm relieved that
> > > they're now merged together for Kata 2.x.
> > >
> > > However, the tests repository is still separate, and AIUI there are no
> > > plans to integrate it.  I still find that really annoying, so I want
> > > to make the case for integrating it into the kata-containers
> > > repository as well.
> > >
> > > 1. It removes delays fixing test bugs
> > >
> > > On several occasions when working on code changes, I've hit CI
> > > failures due to what turn out to be bugs in the tests code.  These
> > > have often been problems with static checks essentially unrelated to
> > > what I'm actually trying to accomplish.
> > >
> > > To deal with this, I've had to file a separate issue and PR against
> > > the tests repo, wait for that to be tested and reviewed, and only then
> > > can I resume work on what I was actually trying to do.  Especially
> > > since I'm a different timezone from most of the Kata team, that can
> > > easily be several days of delay.
> > >
> > > If the tests were integrated, I could include a fix for the test as a
> > > commit in the same PR, it would automatically fix the CI for that PR
> > > and could be reviewed with the same batch.
> > >
> > > 2. Allows tests to be commited along with new features
> > >
> > > Obviously it's desirable for new features to come with tests for those
> > > features.  Integrating the tests repo means that can be done in the
> > > same PR, reducing the amount of github busywork involved in doing so.
> > > It also means the code and tests can be reviewed and discussed in the
> > > same place.
> > >
> > > In addition to being more convenient, that means we don't need to
> > > rerun basically the same tests for both the code PR and the tests PR.
> > > That means less demand on the CI infrastructure, which helps everyone.
> > >
> > > 3. Testing scripts can be simplified
> > >
> > > AFAICT the current scripts in the tests code have a bunch of
> > > conditionals for various different configurations: Kata1 vs. Kata 2.x,
> > > Rust agent vs. Go agent amongst others.  If the tests repo is
> > > integrated we can cut down the test scripts to just the cases that are
> > > relevant for the current version of the code.
> > >
> > > Understanding how the test scripts work is a real barrier to debugging
> > > Kata at the moment, so simplifying them is valuable.
> > >
> > > 3. Removes a barrier to running CI tests locally
> > >
> > > At the moment debugging CI failures is really painful, because
> > > duplicating the problem in a debuggable environment is extremely
> > > awkward.  One (certainly not the only) reason for that is that the
> > > code repo and tests repo need to be both assembled together in a
> > > suitable environment.  The CI scripts do that, but this often involves
> > > downloading one or the other repo from a global URL.  If you want to
> > > do frequently repeated tests on a local repo while debugging, that has
> > > to be worked around.
> > >
> > > If tests and code are in the same repo, it removes the need to
> > > download either one from a global URL, making it easier to replicate
> > > the CI test in a local environment and with an ad-hoc tree.  It also
> > > allows some further simplifications of the CI scripts.
> > >
> > >
> > > I could probably come up with more reasons, but those 3 seem like a
> > > solid start.
> >
> > Solid +1 from me ;-)
> >
> > Now, in the interest of exhaustivity, can you think of reasons not to?
>
> I really can't, but I'm kind of assuming someone will tell me some.
>
> > I can think of a couple, but I'm interested in your viewpoint here.
> >
>
> --
> David Gibson                    | I'll have my music baroque, and my code
> david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au  | minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_
> _other_
>                                 | _way_ _around_!
> http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson
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