[tor-dev] Stem Testing Code Question - Wesleyan Interns

[Damian Johnson]

Hi Erik. Glad to hear that you're digging into the code. When you find
confusing bits feel free to revise the comments (if you find it to be
confusing then it's quite likely others will too - admittedly the
dance with the settings.cfg isn't the most straight forward code).

> In run_tests.py, under the if statement that catches the case of integration
> tests (line 268), there is a block of code that contains a number of
> references to 'targets.'  To start, could you explain the formatting and
> specific purpose of the settings.cfg file?

When running the integration tests you can provide them a set of
'targets' which are use cases that it should test, or attributes that
we want to test with. When you run 'run_tests.py --help' you'll get a
listing of the targets. The ones that start with "RUN_" configure the
tor instance that you're running tests against and the others are
attributes to augment a test instance with (for instance, making it
behave as if it's in a chroot environment).

The settings.cfg [1] is a configuration file that contains stuff that
I don't want to hardcode into the source. For instance, the text that
you get when running 'run_tests.py --help'. It also contains a mapping
between testing targets and the torrc attributes that they should
have. The "RUN_PASSWORD", for instance, is a target and the "PORT,
PASSWORD" are enumerations that are translated into real configuration
values by the runner [2].

For a description of the settings.cfg format see...
http://www.atagar.com/transfer/tmp/stem_html_12_06_05/stem.util.html

Hopefully this makes a bit more sense now. If it doesn't then let me
know what you still find to be confusing.

Cheers! -Damian

[1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/blob/HEAD:/test/settings.cfg
[2] https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/blob/HEAD:/test/runner.py#l81