Checkbox should have a way to not overwrite old submission.xml files

[Brendan Donegan]

Sometimes you want to rerun Checkbox multiple times on the same system, but want to keep each submission.xml for posterity. At the moment this can only be done by manually copying the submission to another location/renaming it. It would be useful to have an option in checkbox (e.g. 'timestamp') which puts a timestamp in the path of the submission.xml file.

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

I saw it suggested that this option needs to be in the actual UI of checkbox rather than just as a command line option for example, so will be exploring that avenue.

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

The way I'll be implementing this is:

Just before the report is generated, check if a submission.xml file exists.

If it does,
    prompt the user if they want to keep it.

If not,
    continue
If they do,
    Rename the old submission to include a timestamp of when it was create
    Write the new one to the default location

Perhaps some sort of cleanup will need to be done to, to make sure there aren't thousands of submission.xml's floating around (seeing as the user has to explicitly request to keep the old one, this may not end up being a problem)

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

Apparently we don't want to implement this in checkbox but rather checkbox-certification only. A little bit of juggling of the code might be necessary before submitting this.

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

I actually disagree with that... This seems to be the kind of feature that may not necessarily be used by a significant portion of community testers, but would be greatly appreciated by those testers who DO run checkbox over and over. I would probably even take advantage of this feature were it in base checkbox, even if only for historical reasons...

Use case:

the community tester who's doing kernel SRU testing. That person may be interested in running checkbox on his/her system at release, saving those results and comparing them later after running checkbox after applying a new kernel SRU.

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

The point is that I don't see the harm in providing this mechanism in base checkbox.

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

We need to discuss this face to face, let's make it happen.

[Brendan Donegan (brendan-donegan)]

This is now done in Checkbox and will never be implemented in Checkbox Certification, so marking this 'Won't Fix'