unity-api-bugs team mailing list archive

[Martin Pitt <martin.pitt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I forgot to comment about creating a new user: This is the difference
between "the test needs root privileges and is even more invasive to the
system" and "the test can run with normal user privileges and does not
leave permanent clutter behind". I. e. creating a new user introduces
the obligation to ensure that it always gets removed again, even if the
test or test runner fails in the middle of the run.

Also, doing so doesn't actually help at all with the main issue here to
centralize the knowledge how to start an UAL session: We need to do that
regardless of whether this happens for a "real" user with a temp $HOME
or for a temp user.

So in summary, creating temp users only makes the test bed setup more
complicated, less convenient, and potentially harmful (due to requiring
root privs) without gaining much.

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You received this bug notification because you are a member of Unity API
bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu Application Launcher.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1376423

Title:
  Provide script to set up a temporary user session

Status in Ubuntu Application Launcher:
  New

Bug description:
  For manual and automated testing we generally need to be able to start
  the applications in a clean environment, in a way that the tests are
  not affected by existing files and configurations. And as the tests
  should be easily runnable on the devs development machines, the
  changes made while running the tests should not affect the real
  environment.

  In the past we were able to get a reasonably clean environment setting
  the value of $HOME to a temporary directory.

  Now this is not enough by a variety of reasons, like a hierarchy of
  dirs in HOME needed by app armor, apps being launched by upstart, and
  services that keep listening to the previous value of HOME.

  Every test suite has solved this on it's own why, some use the real
  environment but backup the existing files (which is really bad), some
  patch the HOME and keep adding details every time something changes,
  and some others just pollute the real environment and can't be run on
  a dev machine. This is what has been causing failures on the majority
  of autopilot tests for the last month.

  Instead of keep doing these multiple solutions, and keep adjusting
  them every time they stop working; I think we need to find one single
  way that works for all the apps. And we need to add automated tests
  for this single way to make sure that no new releases will break it.
  I'm currently thinking of a testability helper in ubuntu-app-launch
  that we call to launch an app and it will make sure that it will start
  all the needed XDG vars pointing to a clean temporary environment. We
  might still need to restart some services, and we might hit some other
  problems, but this is just an idea. Feel free to propose alternatives.

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