969933 - [meta] Remove robotium.config

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Testing, defect)

Description

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

We do a strange dance when running our Robocop tests.  We write a robotium.config file containing a handful of settings (<10) to the device's "deviceroot".  We then pass the "deviceroot" to the Robocop test APK using a command line argument.  See [1].

I see that talos also writes a robotium.config, and for extra giggles, it doesn't share the runtestsremote.py code to do so.  See [2].

[1] http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/base/tests/BaseTest.java#111

[2] https://hg.mozilla.org/build/talos/file/5a7a8e6b7e5b/talos/ttest.py#l191

We would make our lives easier by not writing this robotium.config file at all, and just passing all settings via the command line argument.  This would make it much easier to run Robocop tests locally, since this file would not need to be pushed to the device.

I can imagine that we might hit command line length restrictions [3] [4].  My machine's robotium.config is 336 characters long, and most of that is a local temp file that can't possibly be used by Fennec:

profile=/mnt/sdcard/tests/profile\nlogfile=/mnt/sdcard/tests/logs/mochitest.log\nhost=http://mochi.test:8888/tests\nrawhost=http://10.244.29.221:8888/tests\nenvvars=MOZ_CRASHREPORTER=1,MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_NO_REPORT=1,XPCOM_DEBUG_BREAK=stack,XPCOM_MEM_BLOAT_LOG=/var/folders/8r/5fffr4ys61j691ly5_05q5l00000gn/T/tmpQ8oWR0/runtests_leaks.log

I think this would be a big win for making local testing easier.

[3] https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=30549
[4] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15382475/adb-logcat-issue-when-command-line-is-too-long

Comment 1

[Joel Maher ( :jmaher ) (UTC -8)]

I wouldn't call this a strange dance, we effectively do this with the profile and other data files that we depend on.  While I have no objections to this, I do not see how this will simplify testing in any way at all.

Comment 2

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

(In reply to Joel Maher (:jmaher) from comment #1)
> I wouldn't call this a strange dance, we effectively do this with the
> profile and other data files that we depend on.  While I have no objections
> to this, I do not see how this will simplify testing in any way at all.

Thanks for the prompt reply, Joel.  My motivation was to remove all of the data files that we depend on, but further exploration over the weekend suggests that it will be better to add a new test suite with different assumptions than bend Robocop to my will.  Thanks for your context!

Comment 3

[Geoff Brown [:gbrown]]

Mass closing Firefox for Android :: Testing bugs with no progress in 2017.

If this bug is important to you, please re-open.