I was really impressed and delighted to see how popular my previous (and first) post on FreeBSD testing, titled Introducing the FreeBSD Test Suite, was. Looks like this project may be of great interest to developers and users out there (not unsurprisingly) so I'll try to keep you all up-to-date with any key developments.
A first question that arises from the announcement is: where are the test suite and infrastructure headed? After all, the continuous testing machines for amd64 are already up and running, so what else is there to do?
Well, my friend... a gazillion things really! I've spent some time refactoring the TestSuite project page to give you a better idea of what my vision is both for FreeBSD and Kyua. You can find there a list of verbose goals as well as a link to a more detailed project planning spreadsheet that outlines the roadmap for the project on all the different covered fronts. There are still many unknowns and it is good to explicitly surface them early.
Knowing the current state of Kyua (and ATF), I believe the set goals are pretty ambitious – and that just makes them more exciting. (But... if you pay close attention to the spreadsheet, you may miss time estimates. Sorry but if there were any, they'd be blatant lies except for the most trivial tasks. The amount of time I can spend on open source varies greatly and resolving that by improving my time-management skills sounds like a good new year's resolution.)
Before concluding, let me also answer something you may be wondering: what about NetBSD? Well, I'll save the answer to that for an upcoming post. But the short answer is that both should eventually converge into the same setup once the work in FreeBSD proves itself better.
As usual, feedback is very welcome!
