Re: DTS testpmd and SCAPY integration

[Thomas Monjalon <thomas@monjalon.net>]

23/01/2024 04:42, Honnappa Nagarahalli:
> > 08/01/2024 13:10, Luca Vizzarro:
> > > Your proposal sounds rather interesting. Certainly enabling DTS to
> > > accept YAML-written tests sounds more developer-friendly and should
> > > enable quicker test-writing. As this is an extra feature though – and
> > > a nice-to-have, it should definitely be discussed in the DTS meetings
> > > as Honnappa suggested already.
> > 
> > I would not classify this idea as "nice-to-have".
> > I would split this proposal in 2 parts:
> > 	1/ YAML is an implementation alternative.
> > 	2/ Being able to write a test with a small number of lines,
> > 	reusing some commands from existing tools,
> > 	should be our "must-have" common goal.
> > 
> > Others have mentioned that YAML may not be suitable in complex cases, and
> > that it would be an additional language for test writing.
> > I personnaly think we should focus on a single path which is easy to read and
> > maintain.
> 
> I think we are digressing from the plan we had put forward if we have to go down this path.
> We should understand what it means by going down the YAML format.
> Also, what would happen if there is another innovation in 3 months?

There is a misunderstanding here.
I suggest to take this proposal as an example of the simplicity to reach.
But I agree with you it is more reasonnable to continue with the Python path.

> We already have scatter-gather test suite ported to DPDK repo and has undergone review in the community.
> 
> In the last meeting we went through a simple test case. Is it possible to write the scatter-gather test case in YAML and see how they compare?

After the latest CI meeting we thought about writing a simple text case
in Python with some virtual functions which would abstract all the boilerplate code,
so it would have the same level of simplicity as this YAML proposal.

> > For the configuration side, YAML is already used in DTS.
> > For the test suite logic, do you think we can achieve the same simplicity with
> > some Python code?
> > 
> > We discussed how to progress with this proposal during the CI meeting last
> > week.
> > We need to check how it could look and what we can improve to reach this
> > goal.
> > Patrick proposes a meeting this Wednesday at 2pm UTC.