[Mailman-Developers] GSOC 2014: CI tool for the Mailman suite and postorius improvements

[varun sharma]

Sorry for being out of touch for so long, i was having exams during
community bonding period,so i couldn't spare time for discussions. But
after doing 3 irc meetings with my mentors,i have now pretty clear
understanding on how to proceed with my project but in order to get further
suggestions from community, i am posting all the details of my project:

1. CI tool for Mailman Suite (name yet to decide):
The first part that i will be doing for next 4 weeks is CI tool for Mailman
Suite. I have already started work on that and created a launchpad
repository at https://code.launchpad.net/~varun/mailman/ci_tool. I will try
to adhere to my timeline, so by the end of this week i'll be finishing with
all the unit tests of ci-tool. Right now i've written the rough
implementation of pull and test commands using python's optparse module
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~varun/mailman/ci_tool/view/head:/ci-tool:

ci-tool -p all
(will pull all the projects which includes mailman, mailman.client,
postorius, postorius_standalone, hyperkitty and kittystore)

ci-tool -p hyperkitty
(for pulling a particular project)

ci-tool -t all
(will run all the unit tests from all the projects)

ci-tool -t postorius
(run tests specifically)

The tool is running fine but buildbot is unable to detect the failed tests
in case of running them from ci-tool, i guess i need to write plugin for
nose2 to fix this problem. Link to one of such build is
http://buildbot.sharmalabs.com/builders/runtests/builds/116
The basic commands that i think it should have are 'pull', 'test' and 'try'
but suggestions are welcomed for any new addition.

I request all the creative (and non-creative) members of the community to
suggest some cool names for the ci-tool :)


2. The UI Testing Framework for Postorius:
I have also started working on UI framework and after discussing the
possible testing frameworks that we can use in that, we decided to go with
selenium. I wrote 5 basis tests for testing the ui of postorius with
selenium webdriver (
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~varun/mailman/ci_tool/view/head:/test_postorius.py)
and the i am yet to expand it to hyperkitty. The idea is to include this
framework into ci-tool as an optional feature.

I will be very happy to hear the feedback from the community, so that i'll
be able to make changes to my project accordingly and at right time.
Many thanks to my mentors Florian, Steve and Sneha for helping me in making
this project feasible.

@abhilsh: Sorry, i was really busy during that time,so couldn't replay
accordingly and i'll keep that in mind for future discussions.
@barry: Thanks barry, I'll make sure the test suite works fine with all the
major MTAs, DBMSs and *nix platforms.


Thanks
Varun