openSUSE Conference 2010: Making testing easier

I used to run automated testing of Debian Installer. I originally used a whole rack full of hardware, with serial cables and automated power cycling in order to test a lot of architectures: mips, ia64, alpha, i386, amd64, sparc, hppa. (Qemu supports some of them now; s390 was always run in emulation.)

It was a lot of work, but I think very valuable at certain points in the development of the installer and distribution.

Anyway, in the Debian Installer we may have it easier since our UI frontends are abstracted via debconf, and in 99% of cases, the same code is running whether a graphical UI or a console UI is being used. So the test harness can just boot it in text mode and use expect scripts.