Testing the new LCFG core : Part 2

May 18, 2017

Following on from the basic tests for the new XML parser the next step is to check if the new core libs can be used to correctly store the profile state into a Berkeley DB file. This process is particularly interesting because it involves evaluating any context information and selecting the correct resource values based on the contexts. Effectively the XML profile represents all possible configuration states whereas only a single state is stored in the DB.

The aim was to compare the contents of the old and new DBs for each Informatics LCFG profile. Firstly I used rdxprof to generate DB files using the current libs:

cd /disk/scratch/profiles/inf.ed.ac.uk/
for i in $(find -maxdepth 1 -type d -printf '%f\n' | grep -v '^\.');\
do \
 echo $i; \
 /usr/sbin/rdxprof  -v -u file:///disk/scratch/profiles/ $i; \
done

This creates a DB file for each profile in the /var/lcfg/conf/profile/dbm directory. For 1500-ish profiles this takes a long time…

The next step is to do the same with the new libs:

find /disk/scratch/profiles/ -name '*.xml' | xargs \
perl -MLCFG::Profile -wE \
'for (@ARGV) { eval { $p = LCFG::Profile->new_from_xml($_); \
$n = $p->nodename; \
$p->to_bdb( "/disk/scratch/results/dbm/$n.DB2.db" ) }; \
print $@ if $@ }'

This creates a DB file for each profile in the /disk/scratch/results/dbm directory. This is much faster than using rdxprof.

The final step was to compare each DB. This was done simply using the perl DB_File module to tie each DB to a hash and then comparing the keys and values. Pleasingly this has shown that the new code is generating identical DBs for all the Informatics profiles.

Now I need to hack this together into a test script which other sites can use to similarly verify the code on their sets of profiles.