Lucas Great!! A nice pill for the windows' pain. On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 5:18 PM, Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lmr@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi folks: > > We're on an effort of streamlining the KVM test experience, by choosing > sane defaults and helper scripts that can overcome the initial barrier > with getting the KVM test running. On one of the conversations I've had > today, we came up with the idea of shipping the compiled windows > programs rss.exe and finish.exe, needed for windows hosts testing. > > Even though rss.exe and finish.exe can be compiled in a fairly > straightforward way using the awesome cross compiling environment with > mingw, there are some obvious limitations to it: > > 1) The cross compiling environment is only available for fedora >= 11. > No other distros I know have it. And we have to take care of it, otherwise people will not stop complaining about the complexity involved in kvm testing under autotest. > > 2) Sometimes it might take time for the user to realize he/she has to > compile the source code under unattended/ folder, and how to do it. > > That person would take a couple of failed attempts scratching his/her > head thinking "what the heck is this deps/finish.exe they're talking > about?". Surely documentation can help, and I am looking at making the > documentation on how to do it more easily discoverable. > > That said, shipping the binaries would make the life of those people > easier, and anyway the binaries work pretty well across all versions of > windows from winxp to win7, they are self contained, with no external > dependencies (they all use the standard win32 API). > > 3) That said we also need a script that can build the entire > winutils.iso without making the user to spend way too much time figuring > out how to do it. I want to work on such a script on the next days. > > So, what are your opinions? Should we ship the binaries or pursue a > script that can build those for the user as soon as the (yet to be > integrated) get_started.py script runs? Remember that the later might > mean users of RHEL <= 5.X and debian like will be left out in the cold. I am completely in favour of shipping the binaries and the script to make cd.iso This will also help in install setup of windows guest. I know many people complain that getting up with autotest for kvm testing is so complex, which definitely is not(however it appears). This will make windows testing bit more smooth. In my personal experience, I usually keep a fully configured win.img across multiple qemu-kvm versions for running different tests. The freshly installed images after the install test, I usually delete. So my vote is in favour of shipping the binary( and it is not too large). > > Looking forward hearing your input, > > Lucas > > _______________________________________________ > Autotest mailing list > Autotest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > http://test.kernel.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/autotest > -- Sudhir Kumar -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
