Automated tests using dovecot

[Sebastian Spaeth]

On Tue, 14 Jun 2011 07:01:53 -0400, Ethan Glasser-Camp wrote:
> Could you clarify what you would be willing to install on your laptop?  
> It's possible to install dovecot without it running as a system service 
> -- that's what I do.  Are you unwilling to have dovecot installed at all?

That's what I did as well. Install dovecot, but not running it as a
system service. It gets invoked exclusively by the script while
testing. I think it is a sane approach.

> I think the approach I took is closest to #3, but again, I didn't use an 
> actually chroot with a full OS install available on it.

I think if the process required a full chroot, I wouldn't really
bother to install/run/test it a lot. It sounds just like a real *hassle*
to set up. But if we can make it so that one simply has to install
default dovecot and run "./offlineimap.py --test" (or a script in the /test
dir), I certainly would be running it every time before I submit a patch.

> I like this approach, and it feels cleaner and more flexible, but it 
> also does sound like a little more work.

I am for using what we have. And do improvements/refactoring as we
go. I would like to use, not build a test harness :).

> Meaning, "Please test against Gmail with these credentials", "Please 
> test against rootless Dovecot", and so on?

We will be needing to use lots of different environments in any case, as
we need IMAP<->Maildir, IMAP<->IMAP, and Gmail<->whatever in any
case. So there will be needed some future possibilities to enable tests
if we eg. provide user credentials for an account "gmail" in the
test/offlineimap.conf it could run all tests related to gmail.

> So cook.sh would be a wrapper around simpler scripts that actually 
> implement the functionality (deliver, count mail, etc.)?

How we achieve this, I don't care. No bike shedding here from my side ;)

> I think it's a great idea but somewhat ambitious considering our limited 
> pool of manpower.  Is it really likely that other projects will join in 
> and contribute?  The perfect is the enemy of the good.

I agree that we should be using what we have and improve on that. It is
a thousand times better than what we have now (=nothing). We will find
ways to improve the infrastructure over time.

As for this living in a separate repo or in offlineimap proper, I don't
have strong feelings. On the one hand, it would be nice to make it an
integral part of offlineimap, and force everyone who checks out OI to
automatically have the test suite. On the other hand, it will always
require some more set up (as in dovecot etc), so a separate repository
is probably just as fine.

Sebastian
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