[Yum-devel] More test cases

[Florian Festi]

Sorry,

I didn't want to bring that issue up before F8 is out as I was assuming that 
most people are quite busy. But as obsoletes seam to blow up right now...

It starts with a simple question:

What's the policy about failing test cases? Do we keep them disabled until 
the yum behavior matches the expectations of the test case? Do we check them 
in at all? Do we just let them fail?

Behind this there are some much further going issues. First thing to mention 
here is multilib. While reading various fedora mailing lists and IRC 
channels I got the impression that this issue is going to be revisited and 
reconsidered in the near future (F9 time frame?).

Additionally there are several other issues that need a closer look: 
obsoletes (which trouble us right now), conflicts (which are on the todo 
list anyway) and any combinations with each other and (multilib) updates. 
While the multilib issue needs to be discussed on a wider base I still 
belief we should have a well founded technical opinion where there are 
problems with the current implementation and what options we have to solve 
them. In fact I belief we should come up with a plan before everyone else 
starts chitchatting on that topic.

Beside a higher level discussion on what consistency constrains we want and 
can impose on yum's behavior we need a way to nail things down to single 
issues. The proper tool for that would be test suite that is build round the 
scenarios in question.

In addition of being a good base of discussion such test suite could also 
document and fortify the "right" behavior and establish trust into the code 
base. It will also allow changing the behavior of yum with less worries 
about breaking something else. In fact it has been on our todo/wish list for 
quite some time.

While writing some test cases I realized how easy it is to come up with a 
new scenario and how easy you run into situations where it isn't obvious if 
yum's behavior is really the right one. As a result of this first impression 
I am planning to come up with an even bigger number of test cases (several 
more dozens at least) and then start picking the most interesting of them to 
discuss single decisions made in the depsolver or by commands (install, 
update, remove, ...).

Stay tuned

Florian