Checkbox should allow tests to be loaded from a remote source

[Nicholas Skaggs]

I would like to be able to host tests on a remote host and have checkbox display the availible remote tests. If a user then selects a remote test, it should download it, parse it and run the tests accordingly.

This would make it easy for us to support new tests as we can decouple having to package them into the app, or create wrappers (as we do now) to grab the tests we want.

[elimisteve (elimisteve)]

This sounds like a reasonable way to let 3rd party developers get our apps tested by users, assuming we can convince them to manually add our URLs as test sources.

Do you see this as something Canonical might be interested in allowing, in order to boost the quality of not just the core apps, but all apps?

Long-term this may not work well when there's tens of thousands of apps, but for a while, I think it would.

Thanks!

[Maciej Kisielewski (kissiel)]

We are planning to introduce a 'provider' unit type. This provider unit could specify how content of the provider could be obtained.

As for now, similar behaviour may be achieved by using local jobs and test plan's bootstrap_include field. The local job should wget/curl the file (and process it if necessary), printing out all jobs definitions.
bootstrap_include serves to specify which jobs should run at first (usually those jobs render more jobs, as in this case).