Return to kyua.mdwn CVS log

Up to [NetBSD Developer Wiki] / wikisrc

Try to reflect the current situation

- devel/kyua-cli and devel/kyua-testers were merged into devel/kyua
- no need to install devel/atf specifically since devel/kyua depends on it
- devel/atf-libs was merged into devel/atf

There are some issues remaining with the current documentation:
- atf-run and atf-report are nowhere to be found in pkgsrc anymore
- same for atf2kyua

    1: [[!meta title="Kyua: An introduction for NetBSD users"]]
    2: 
    3: **Contents**
    4: 
    5: [[!toc levels=2]]
    6: 
    7: The [Automated Testing Framework](ATF), or ATF for short, is a software
    8: package composed of two parts: the *ATF libraries* and the *ATF tools*.
    9: The ATF libraries provide a toolkit for developers to implement test cases
   10: in a variety of languages: C, C++ and POSIX shell.  The ATF tools provide
   11: the utilities to run such test cases in an automated way and to generate
   12: reports.
   13: 
   14: The ATF tools have some
   15: [design and, particularly, implementation problems](http://mail-index.netbsd.org/atf-devel/2010/11/13/msg000206.html)
   16: that make it hard to add support for highly desired features such as
   17: parallel execution of test cases, unified dashboards covering multiple test
   18: runs ([like this one](http://releng.netbsd.org/test-results.html)), the
   19: ability to run legacy or third-party test programs that do not use the ATF
   20: libraries, and the ability to tune the timeout of test cases.
   21: 
   22: *Kyua's current goal is to reimplement _only_ the ATF tools* while
   23: maintaining backwards compatibility with the tests written with the ATF
   24: libraries (i.e. with the NetBSD test suite).
   25: 
   26: Because Kyua is a replacement of some ATF components, the end goal is to
   27: integrate Kyua into the NetBSD base system (just as ATF is) and remove the
   28: deprecated ATF components.  Removing the deprecated components will allow
   29: us to make the above-mentioned improvements to Kyua, as well as many
   30: others, without having to deal with the obsolete ATF code base.
   31: *Discussing how and when this transition might happen is out of the scope
   32: of this document at the moment.*
   33: 
   34: This page provides instructions on how to use Kyua with the current NetBSD
   35: test suite so that you can experiment with the tool, familiarize yourself
   36: with it and provide feedback early on.
   37: 
   38: **If you would like more details on how the import of Kyua into NetBSD will
   39:   happen, please see [[Kyua: The way into NetBSD|/kyua/import]].**
   40: 
   41: # What's in the name?
   42: 
   43: You should really think of Kyua as ATF 2.x.  Then, why isn't it just ATF
   44: 2.x?
   45: 
   46: To be honest, I never liked the ATF name: it was picked for me as part of
   47: the Google Summer of Code 2007 program and I did not think about changing
   48: it at that time.  A year later, I learned that the ATF acronym is severely
   49: overloaded, which makes it hard to find the project on popular search
   50: engines, and has unpopular connotations in specific countries.
   51: 
   52: So, as part of the rewrite, I decided to choose a new name: a name that is
   53: not an acronym and thus can be easily pronounced, and a name that is quite
   54: unique in search results.  The name is Kyua, which is just a play on the
   55: pronounciation of the Q.A. acronym.  Originally, my intention was to
   56: pronounce Kyua as Q.A., but in reality this never happened.  Today, just
   57: read the name as your instinct would: "Kyu-ah".
   58: 
   59: # Why is Kyua a third-party project?
   60: 
   61: Kyua's main consumer is NetBSD.  One could argue that Kyua should be
   62: developed within NetBSD and maintained in the NetBSD source tree.  However,
   63: there is nothing in the Kyua project that inherently depends on NetBSD, and
   64: maintaining it as a third-party package is a way to keep the developers
   65: honest regarding portability.
   66: 
   67: Ideally, other projects (such as FreeBSD) would make use of Kyua too for
   68: their testing needs, and if that happened we would be able to share tests
   69: with them pretty easily.  Forcing a portable codebase in the upstream
   70: repository helps in this.  (Be aware that different individuals from
   71: FreeBSD and Minix have shown interest in adopting Kyua for their respective
   72: systems!)
   73: 
   74: # Main differences (aka "what to expect")
   75: 
   76: As of version 0.5, Kyua has (or is supposed to have) feature parity with
   77: the ATF tools.  That said, having feature parity does not imply that they
   78: are the same.  This section outlines a few of the differences that you
   79: should be aware of before continuing.
   80: 
   81: ## Results database
   82: 
   83: Kyua collects the results of the execution of a test suite into an SQLite
   84: database.  User-friendly reports are later generated by extracting data
   85: from this same database.
   86: 
   87: In ATF, the results of the execution were written to an internal format
   88: that only atf-report could understand.  Despite of the database, Kyua still
   89: maintains the separation of "tests execution" from "report generation".
   90: 
   91: The contents of the database are immutable and incremental.  This means
   92: that, in the future, the Kyua tools will be able to provide historical data
   93: for particular test cases, or for whole test runs (which is what other
   94: NetBSD developers have ended up implementing multiple times outside of ATF
   95: because the framework did not provide such functionality by itself).
   96: 
   97: ## Support for multiple test interfaces
   98: 
   99: Kyua has support for different "test interfaces", which means that Kyua can
  100: execute test programs written using different paradigms and collect their
  101: results into a single report.  At the moment, two interfaces are supported:
  102: 
  103: * The "atf" interface provides compatibility with those test programs that
  104:   use the ATF libraries.  This is the only interface currently used by the
  105:   NetBSD test suite, as there is no way to run any other test program in an
  106:   automated manner.
  107: 
  108: * The "plain" interface permits the execution of legacy test programs that
  109:   do not use any testing library.  Such test programs are those that just
  110:   return 0 or non-0 to indicate the success or failure of the test
  111:   (respectively).  This feature will allow the NetBSD test suite to
  112:   transparently execute third-party test suites (such as the IPF or GCC
  113:   test suites) without having to implement ATF-based wrappers.  It will
  114:   also lower the barrier of entry to writing test programs for NetBSD, as
  115:   using the ATF libraries will become optional.
  116: 
  117: These interfaces are implemented as independent binaries, called testers,
  118: that are fully scriptable.  The testers are provided in the `kyua-testers`
  119: package.  The idea behind having these as independent programs is to
  120: restrict the OS-specific code to a small subset of Kyua written in C, and
  121: thus to allow the higher-level layers to be written in other languages
  122: (possibly Lua).
  123: 
  124: ## Lua configuration files
  125: 
  126: Kyua has two kind of configuration files: the Kyuafiles, which are the
  127: files shipped with a test suite that describe what test programs need to be
  128: run; and the user configuration files, which specify the run-time settings
  129: of Kyua and the test suites.  ATF had this same split of configuration
  130: files, and they were written in a custom language, with a custom parser.
  131: 
  132: The Kyua configuration files are all Lua scripts.  The major advantage of
  133: this at the moment is that their syntax will be familiar to end users, and
  134: that the parser for these files is well-tested.  In the future, the use of
  135: Lua will allow the implementation of more-intelligent test (and maybe even
  136: build) scripts.
  137: 
  138: ## Direct HTML output
  139: 
  140: All of the NetBSD continous build and testing systems provide status
  141: reports through the releng web interface.  In the case of ATF, this has
  142: traditionally been tricky because ATF cannot generate HTML contents
  143: directly; instead, `atf-report` generates XML output which later must be
  144: postprocessed with `xsltproc` to create the HTML pages.
  145: 
  146: Kyua has the ability to generate HTML reports straight from the tool,
  147: without having to go through any XML toolchain.  This means that NetBSD,
  148: out of the box, can generate such reports and publish them with the builtin
  149: httpd(8) server.
  150: 
  151: ## Heavier code base
  152: 
  153: If you take a look at the Kyua distribution file, you may notice that it is
  154: about the same size as the distribution file of ATF, yet Kyua does not
  155: currently replace the ATF libraries.  This may be surprising because it
  156: seems to imply that the codebase of Kyua is bigger because it "just"
  157: reimplements atf-run and atf-report: i.e. by just reimplementing parts of
  158: ATF, it is already as big as the whole of ATF.
  159: 
  160: This is true, for two reasons.
  161: 
  162: The first is that Kyua is more featureful and flexible: the features
  163: outlined above have a cost in terms of implementation, and the codebase of
  164: Kyua is more carefully crafted to allow for later growth.  In particular,
  165: all OS-specific details have been abstracted for easier portability, and
  166: the SQLite and Lua libraries have been wrapped for safety.
  167: 
  168: The second is that Kyua is much better tested (which is very important for
  169: a software package that you will rely on to validate your own software!).
  170: To give you some numbers, ATF 0.16 contains around 400 test cases for both
  171: atf-run and atf-report while Kyua 0.5 contains around 1100 test cases.
  172: 
  173: # Components
  174: 
  175: Kyua, as a project, is made up of a variety of components (which *include*
  176: ATF, because the ATF libraries are *not* being rewritten).  All of these
  177: components exist in pkgsrc, and are:
  178: 
  179: * pkgsrc/devel/atf: The ATF tools, namely atf-run and atf-report.  These
  180:   are deprecated and this package should eventually disappear.
  181: 
  182: * pkgsrc/devel/kyua: The Kyua command-line interface, which provides a
  183:   superset of the functionality of atf-run and atf-report.
  184: 
  185: # Running the NetBSD test suite
  186: 
  187: There are two ways to run the NetBSD test suite with Kyua.  The easy (or
  188: trivial) way is to use the backwards compatibility ATF tools, and the more
  189: sophisticated way is to convert the test suite to Kyua and use the native
  190: Kyua binary.  This section explains both approaches.
  191: 
  192: ## Using the ATF compatibility tools
  193: 
  194: The easiest (but also the least "future-proof") way to run the NetBSD test
  195: suite with Kyua is to use the backwards compatibility ATF tools provided by
  196: the kyua-atf-compat module.  First of all, install the package:
  197: 
  198:     $ cd /usr/pkgsrc/devel/kyua-atf-compat
  199:     $ make install && make clean
  200: 
  201: And then, running the test suite is as easy as:
  202: 
  203:     $ cd /usr/tests
  204:     $ /usr/pkg/bin/atf-run | /usr/pkg/bin/atf-report
  205: 
  206: Please be aware that if the atf-run and atf-report tools provided by
  207: kyua-atf-compat appear in your PATH before the real atf-run and atf-report
  208: tools shipped by NetBSD, you will experience test failures for all the
  209: tests in /usr/tests/atf/atf-run and /usr/tests/atf/atf-report.  This is
  210: expected: while the compatibility tools behave similarly to the real tools
  211: from a user's perspective, they are not fully interchangeable.  (For
  212: example, the serialization format between atf-run and atf-report is
  213: different.)
  214: 
  215: One property of the atf-run wrapper is that it uses the default results
  216: database in ~/.kyua/store.db to record the execution of the tests.  This
  217: means that, once the execution of the tests is done with the compatibility
  218: tools, you can still use the native Kyua binary to poke at the results
  219: database.  More on this below.
  220: 
  221: ## Using the native Kyua command-line interface
  222: 
  223: The preferred way to run the NetBSD test suite with Kyua is to use the
  224: native Kyua command-line binary.  This is the preferred method because it
  225: trains you to use the new interface rather than relying on the old pipeline
  226: and because it exposes you to all the new features of Kyua.  Regardless,
  227: this and the previous approach will yield the same results for a particular
  228: execution.
  229: 
  230: Using the native command-line interface is a multi-step process because
  231: the existing NetBSD test suite is not prepared for Kyua.  Let's take a look
  232: at these steps.
  233: 
  234: To get started, install the Kyua package:
  235: 
  236:     $ cd /usr/pkgsrc/devel/kyua
  237:     $ make install clean
  238: 
  239: Once this is done, configure Kyua in the same way ATF is configured "out of
  240: the box" in NetBSD.  Create a /usr/pkg/etc/kyua/kyua.conf file containing:
  241: 
  242:     syntax('config', 1)
  243:     unprivileged_user = '_tests'
  244: 
  245: The next step is to populate /usr/tests with Kyuafiles, as Kyua is unable
  246: to read existing Atffiles.  This is easy to do with the atf2kyua(1) tool
  247: shipped in the kyua-atf-compat package:
  248: 
  249:     # atf2kyua /usr/tests
  250: 
  251: And that is it.  You can now execute the test suite using Kyua with any of
  252: the following two forms:
  253: 
  254:     $ cd /usr/tests && kyua test
  255:     $ kyua test -k /usr/tests/Kyuafile
  256: 
  257: Note that none of these will generate "pretty" reports.  These commands
  258: will only record the results of the execution into the database.  In order
  259: to generate reports, keep reading.
  260: 
  261: # Generating reports
  262: 
  263: Once you have ran the NetBSD test suite with any of the mechanisms above,
  264: the results of the execution have been stored in the "Kyua store", which is
  265: a database located in ~/.kyua/store.db by default.  (This path can be
  266: changed at any time with the --store flag.)
  267: 
  268: To extract a report from the database using the results of the latest tests
  269: run, you can run any of the following:
  270: 
  271:     $ kyua report -o my-report.txt
  272:     $ kyua html-report -o /var/www/results/
  273: 
  274: # Support and feedback
  275: 
  276: The Kyua manual is available in the GNU Info format and can be accessed by
  277: running:
  278: 
  279:     $ info kyua
  280: 
  281: Alternatively, use the help subcommand to get built-in documentation.  The
  282: following invocation will print all the available subcommands:
  283: 
  284:     $ kyua help
  285: 
  286: And an invocation like this will show you all the possible options for a
  287: given subcommand:
  288: 
  289:     $ kyua help report-html
  290: 
  291: If you have gone through the instructions above and started playing with
  292: Kyua, please do not hesitate to report your experiences (either good or
  293: bad) to [Julio Merino](mailto:jmmv@NetBSD.org)!  Any comments will be
  294: highly appreciated and will be taken into account for the near future of
  295: Kyua.