Re: venv for python qtest bits? (was: Re: [PATCH 11/12] acpi/tests/bits: add README file for bits qtests)

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2022 at 01:55:48PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2022 at 06:06:19PM +0530, Ani Sinha wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 28, 2022 at 5:40 PM Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> 
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > On Tue, 28 Jun 2022 at 12:50, Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > I think the main difference is not even in how it works, it's
> > > > in what it does. Which is check that ACPI tables are sane.
> > > > Who cares about that? Well developers do when they change the
> > > > tables. Users really don't because for users we have the expected
> > > > tables in tree and we check against these.
> > >
> > > It wants to build and run a big guest binary blob -- that to me is
> > > the main difference. Users don't much care about any of our tests,
> > 
> > perhaps but we do enforce patch submitters to make sure make check
> > passes before submitting patches. make check-avocado is not run as
> > part of make check, requires considerable disk space to download all
> > guest images and hence generally not run by patch submitters. Making
> > bits parts of avocado tests almost defeats the purpose of having this
> > test at all.
> 
> This proposed biosbits test also involves a considerable download.
> The test is said to be irrelevant for anyone except those working
> on a fairly narrow set of QEMU firmware related bits. So by the same
> rationale we shouldn't impose that burden on everyone working on
> QEMU by having it in qtest. Making it entirely optional, only
> downloaded by avocado on demand, for the people who need to run
> the tests is best.
> 
> With regards,
> Daniel

Optional is fine. I would like to make life easy for
developers working on ACPI though, the field is unforgiving
enough as it is.
How about we skip the test if the submodule is not checked out?

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