LCFG Server tests

September 2, 2009

I’m still working on testing the output from development versions of the LCFG server by taking a known input and generating XML profiles which can be compared against known “good” output. The test suite seemed to be mostly running fairly well on my test server, telford, but I’ve been seeing a few oddities related to the last-modified-file which I couldn’t explain. This afternoon I decided to try running an experimental version of the server on my desktop instead and I couldn’t get it to do anything sensible at all for ages. Eventually I tracked this down to a couple of symlinks in the input “releases” directory for the develop and default releases which were absolute paths. This worked on telford as that is acting as a full test LCFG slave server and has all the data directories installed but, of course, didn’t on my desktop. Changing those links to relative links now gives nice predictable output. I’ve updated my input data collection scripts so it won’t happen again. I think there’s a lesson here about being careful over where tests are run to be sure they are really doing something useful.