Last week I was having a conversation with a friend, and while we were discussing some things I mentioned some Ubuntu tools that were completely natural for me since I use them every day in Ubuntu development and for my work, but he was completely amazed by them, so I decided to blog on the subject so more people can know about them.
I’m going to start with the one that impressed him the most: qa-regression-testing branch
The QA and security team maintain a test suite to check for regressions in packages they are updating. These tests are written with python unittest. Most of this test suite can be a little harmful for a production system, so it’s recommended to run it using a chroot environment or a virtual machine and to help with that there is a make-test-tarball script. From the script:
export HOSTS=”sec-intrepid-amd64 sec-hardy-amd64 sec-dapper-amd64″
export TEST=test-glibc-security
./make-test-tarball $TEST.py
for i in $HOSTS; do
scp /tmp/qrt-$TEST.tar.gz $i.local:
done
for i in $HOSTS; do
ssh -t $i.local “hostname; rm -rf qrt-$TEST; tar zxf qrt-$TEST.tar.gz; cd qrt-$TEST && ./$TEST.py -v”
done
As you can imagine HOSTS are the hostnames of the virtual machines where the tests are going to run.
Writing those test isn’t rocket science, you just need a little knowledge of the package and the functionality you want to test and python unittesting, there is even a skeleton script that can help you start writing your test.
Hope this information is useful for you! And as usual, patches are welcome!
, c’mon you hate him as well) and learned things i wouldn’t in a normal local based company, i learned almost the hard way that when you say “Asian people” you are talking about Indians as well (isn’t it Polly?) and also notice how different cultures can be, some things that are completely natural and normal for me can be really disturbing and offensive for others and vice versa. 
