action #10162
Updated by okurz over 8 years ago
## current situation
* *opensuse* and *sle12* are tracked in separate branches (*main* and *sle12*)
* test definitions reside in different directories when both product groups are needed
* *sle12* actually needs two working copies of the git repo, one tracking *sle12* branch, one for *opensuse* branch, with symlinks in *sle12* directory to *opensuse* subdirs
## problem
* as the *sle12* branch does not contain the actual tests it is sometimes forgotten and not updated accordingly
* it is impossible to share code in *opensuse*/main.pm and *sle12*/main.pm, the content is duplicated
* changes in one branch need to be kept in sync manually, e.g. by making two pull requests for separate branches and taking care that they are both merged at the same time
* *sle12* repo has to be setup with symlinks (manually) to be usable for testing
## suggestion
* Add support in os-autoinst to load main.pm based on env variable DISTRI (see https://github.com/os-autoinst/os-autoinst/pull/376)
* Put *opensuse* "main.pm" into "products/opensuse/main.pm"
* Merge *sle* content into **master** branch and put *sle12* "main.pm" into "products/sle/main.pm" (see https://github.com/os-autoinst/os-autoinst-distri-opensuse/pull/920)
### Reasoning
Branches should not be used to track different products (or flavors) with a common subset. Branches in VCS should only be (and commonly are) used for two different purposes:
* short-lived local branches for developers, "feature branches"
* different versions of the same product for maintenance purposes: Only selected bugfixes are back-ported
As the differences between *opensuse* and *sle12* are only the files "main.pm" and "templates" (and outdated "variables" and "Makefile" file in *sle12* branch), every product should rather be in its own subfolder, e.g. "products/opensuse/main.pm", "products/sle/main.pm", etc.
It looks like without changing "os-autoinst" symlinks can not be used completely to make the proper tests available, e.g. just a simple symlink "products/sle12/" into "/var/lib/openqa/tests/" as well as "products/opensuse" into the same instead of directly putting the git repo in master branch into a subdir "opensuse" and multiple symlinks in *sle12* subdir … does not work that easily because "isotovideo" not only loads the main.pm but other stuff from casedir. But I see no problem with extenden "isotovideo" to also look for a path based on the DISTRI variable which is set anyway. But as I don't have admin access to openqa.opensuse.org I can not completely check if there is another DISTRI set than just "opensuse" in which case the directory structure and variables should be aligned.