xen and software testing

[Michael A. Peters]

Today I took a machine of mine that had been a headless server, no gui.

I used yum groupinstall to get gnome desktop environment onto it, etc. -
and then proceeded to use yum to install one of the packages I maintain.
It segfaulted before starting. I installed the debug package and tried
through gdb - results is no debugging symbols found and then it
segfaults - this is all before the gui is loaded.

I put in another HD and did a fresh install on same hardware, choosing
gnome desktop environment - yum installed my app, and it runs
beautifully.

The headless server started as FC4test2 and was yum updated to FC4 so
its possible there is some cruft left, but I suspect that there is some
non shared library dependency that is not specified that isn't there.

I compiled the software myself on that machine with rpmbuild -bi and ran
the binary from the buildroot, same broken result.

This got me thinking - since we use mock to get an absolute minimal
build environment, if maybe we should look at implementing something
similar (mook for lack of creativity) with xen to provide an absolute
minimal qa environment?

IE mook foobar.rpm will use yum to create a minimal system with
foobar.rpm that a packager/tester can use to test for unspecified
dependencies that rpm didn't catch.

With another package of mine, I found such a missing dependency when I
tried to use it inside of mock for a personal rpm - it might be
beneficial if there was a tool with which to *easily* create a minimal
QA environment to make sure all runtime dependencies really are there.