On 12/6/25 09:22, Alyssa Ross wrote:
Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com> writes:
On 12/6/25 08:36, Alyssa Ross wrote:
Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com> writes:
On 12/6/25 07:32, Alyssa Ross wrote:
Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com> writes:
On 12/6/25 07:26, Alyssa Ross wrote: > Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com> writes: > >> While trying to sandbox the file chooser portal, I broke it. >> This caused files not to be saved, resulting in silent data loss. >> Unfortunately, the integration test still passed. >> >> Is this a bug in the test? Is there a better alternative to manual >> testing? > > Not presently, but we can work on improving the test. The current > portal test was written as a regression test for a specific issue we > had. It's quite hard to test completely end to end but we could do a > lot better. > > I would quite like to spend some time in February or so working on our > tests.
Would it make sense to use openQA for this? Qubes OS uses openQA and it works very well. openQA is written in Perl, but it’s the best tool I know of for this.
First blocker there would be packaging openQA in Nixpkgs. I do not personally relish the idea of doing that.
Would it be possible to instead use a Fedora container? openQA is packaged in Fedora. Qubes OS uses dedicated CI machines for openQA, so I'm not worried about whether this would be permitted on your dev box or the binary cache builders.
I use Fedora for everything that isn't Spectrum-related dev work, so I know how to maintain a Fedora system. That said, a container shouldn't need much (if any) ongoing maintenance.
I think the hermicity and bisectability of our build and tests are important properties worth preserving. We lose that if we start relying on an opaque container image. If an openQA update breaks something, it's not possible to easily figure out why. Fedora container images contain an RPM database that can be used to determine which packages changed. There will likely be many packages that changed between images, but the same is true of Nixpkgs. I totally agree that using a mutable Fedora system that is upgraded in-place would be a mistake.
This is not sufficient for bisectability, because I have no access to intermediate steps between the two images.
How is Nixpkgs better in this regard? Is it because Nixpkgs only changes one package at a time and has a linear history? Question for the Qubes developers: has Qubes OS ever ran into a regression in openQA itself, and how hard was it to debug? -- Sincerely, Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers)