Testing the dist-upgrade process (for Dapper)

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Mon, Jan 09, 2006 at 12:51:52PM -0300, Carlos Ribeiro wrote:
> I agree that testing the upgrade is very a difficult, time consuming (and
> boring) procedure. That's why I believe it should be automated.

I also believe that it should be automated, so we're in agreement there as
well.  Unfortunately, it takes a lot more than this shared to actually
accomplish this. ;-)

> One alternative idea is to develop a "suggested test procedure" for
> dist-upgrade which includes steps such as making a full image backup of the
> system before trying it; while advisable, I doubt that people effectively do
> it (out of lazyness, and counting with the fact that the process works well
> enough most of the time for anyone with some familiarity with it). Other
> similar plans can be devised (using VMWare non-persistent disk images, for
> example).

This isn't an alternative, but a prerequisite.  Before we can even think
about automated upgrade testing, we need to have a test plan which could be
carried out by a human, which can then be used and revised within the
community as we learn more about what is important to test.  Then we can
start to think about the complexity of automating it.

We would be glad to have your help, and that of anyone else interested in
upgrade testing, in creating such a plan.

-- 
 - mdz