The Megatest Users Manual
=========================
Matt Welland <matt@kiatoa.com>
v1.0, April 2012
:doctype: book
[dedication]
Dedication
==========
Dedicated to my wife Joanna who has kindly supported my working on various projects over the years.
Thanks
------
Thank you the many people I've worked over the years who have
shared their knowledge and insights with me.
Thanks also to the creators of the various open source projects that
Megatest is built on. These include Linux, xemacs, chicken scheme,
fossil and asciidoc. Without these projects something like Megatest
would be difficult or impossible to do.
[preface]
Preface
=======
This book is organised as three sub-books; getting started, writing tests and reference.
Why Megatest?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Megatest project was started for two reasons, the first was an
immediate and pressing need for a generalized tool to manage a suite
of regression tests and the second was the fact that I had written or
maintained several such tools at different companies over the years
and it seemed a good thing to have a single open source tool, flexible
enough to meet the needs of any team doing continuous integrating and
or running a complex suite of tests for release qualification.
Megatest Design Philosophy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Megatest is intended to provide the minimum needed resources to make
writing a suite of tests and implementing continuous build for
software, design engineering or process control (via owlfs for
example) without being specialized for any specific problem
space. Megatest in of itself does not know what constitutes a PASS or
FAIL of a test. In most cases megatest is best used in conjunction
with logpro or a similar tool to parse, analyze and decide on the test
outcome.
Megatest Architecture
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All data to specify the tests and configure the system is stored in
plain text files. All system state is stored in an sqlite3
database. Tests are launched using the launching system available for
the distributed compute platform in use. A template script is provided
which can launch jobs on local and remote Linux hosts. Currently
megatest uses the network filesystem to call home to your master
sqlite3 database.
include::getting_started.txt[] include::writing_tests.txt[]
include::reference.txt[]
Controlled waiver propagation
=============================
If test is FAIL and previous test in run with same MT_TARGET is WAIVED then apply the following rules from the testconfig:
If a waiver check is specified in the testconfig apply the check and if it passes then set this FAIL to WAIVED
Waiver check has two parts, 1) a list of waiver, rulename, filepatterns and 2) the rulename script spec (note that "diff" and "logpro" are predefined)
=========================================================
###### EXAMPLE FROM testconfig #########
# matching file(s) will be diff'd with previous run and logpro applied
# if PASS or WARN result from logpro then WAIVER state is set
#
[waivers]
# logpro_file rulename input_glob
waiver_1 logpro lookittmp.log
[waiver_rules]
# This builtin rule is the default if there is no <waivername>.logpro file
# diff diff %file1% %file2%
# This builtin rule is applied if a <waivername>.logpro file exists
# logpro diff %file1% %file2% | logpro %waivername%.logpro %waivername%.html
=========================================================
[appendix]
Example Appendix
================
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Appendix Sub-section
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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[bibliography]
Example Bibliography
====================
The bibliography list is a style of AsciiDoc bulleted list.
[bibliography]
- [[[taoup]]] Eric Steven Raymond. 'The Art of Unix
Programming'. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-13-142901-9.
- [[[walsh-muellner]]] Norman Walsh & Leonard Muellner.
'DocBook - The Definitive Guide'. O'Reilly & Associates. 1999.
ISBN 1-56592-580-7.
[glossary]
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================
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================
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