Continuous Integration of the Debian Installer?
Hello,
Is there a Continuous Integration (CI) infrastructure in place for
testing the Debian Installer (d-i)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration
It would be nice testing automatically the different installation
paths (CLI vs. GUI, various setups of ZFS) for the daily images of the
d-i, especially for architectures without lots of users (e.g.
kfreebsd-*). I think d-i images would benefit from C-I more that
Debian packages (for which - I understand - test suites are run after
build), as d-i images (or at least most flavors of it) depend on a
Debian repository that has udebs "working" for that particular version
of the d-i, and d-i is a quite complex piece of software.
For the basic tests, I guess that a Debian GNU/Linux box would be
enough (also for testing kfreebsd-* installer images). The basic test
should:
* Download the latest daily installer (e.g. for kfreebsd-i386)
* Create a fake installation disk (i.e. a file)
* Run qemu, specifying the installer image and the fake disk
* Preseed the d-i in some way, ensuring to configure the network
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed
* Detect the end of the installation
* Run again qemu, specifying the fake disk with the (hopefully)
installed Debian (the d-i image is not needed anymore)
* Do some simple sanity checks, e.g. ping the qemu node (ssh-ing to it
would be better...)
* Consider the test as failed or passed
More advanced checks could be to try to mount the resulting fake
installed disk and assert some predicates on it (e.g. I can mount it
as UFS, the partitioning is as expected, some files are present to
disk...).
If there is no such infrastructure, a Debian GNU/Linux x86/x86-64
testing "Wheezy" would be needed for starting. I would propose jenkins
installed on it as a CI tool (as I used it a bit...).
http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/jenkins
BTW someone worked on Jenkins and Debian.
http://jenkins-debian-glue.org/
Comments?
Regards
Luca
P.S.
If there is a box with Debian installed available for this, I would be
available to try to set it up (with no hurry, sadly I only have very
small chunks of spare time...)
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