919300 - mochitest sets profile object on self which imposes an undocumented workflow

Status: NEW

(Testing :: Mochitest, defect)

Description

[Jeff Hammel]

Objects generally have methods that can be called without precondition
or that take some effort to safeguard against their calling when
preconditions are not met (i.e. sanity checks) or they attempt to
fulfill the preconditions.  The setting of `self.profile` on the
Mochitest,
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/testing/mochitest/runtests.py#483
, and B2GMochitest,
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/testing/mochitest/runtestsb2g.py#101
, instances imply the one-shot workflow currently used in testing.  If
we want a one-shot....that's fine.  But in this case it would be nice to
document how the harnesses are supposed to work since why
e.g. the profile goes on self and manifest is returned by
buildProfile/build_profile and what else lives as an instance
variables vs in options isn't particularly based on any sort of reason
that I can see.