[Libguestfs] Regression testing inspection code

[Continuing a discussion we had on IRC last week ...] How to create meaningful regression tests for the inspection code? We'd like developers to be able to test that changes to the inspection code don't break inspection of existing guests. We might not be able to run these tests routinely, and we might have to accept that they have to download hundreds of megabytes of test data. Idea #1: Run virt-inspector on cloud images ---------------------------------------------------------------------- eg: virt-inspector -a http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/19/Images/x86... Unfortunately this doesn't work for a couple of reasons. Firstly the Curl driver in qemu is broken (RHBZ#971790). Secondly even when I implemented a workaround, the command above doesn't work reliably when connecting to a slow mirror, because of SCSI timeouts inside the appliance. Idea #2: Make "reduced" test images available ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Delete bits of real test images so they are small enough to distribute. Inspection doesn't look at the vast majority of files in a test image. The hard bit is working out which bits inspection *does* need to look at, either now or in the future. I wrote a small program to test this. Unfortunately it doesn't reduce images that much. We'd still be talking about ~50-100MB to host + distribute per test case, and we'd ideally want >20 test cases so that's still multiple gigabytes of test data. I've attached the program to this email in case anyone wants to look at this further. Any other ideas ...? Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top