[PLUG] Chef & CFEngine testing

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

Thanks to Kevin for his Chef testing preso at PLUG N the other day. 
Very cool stuff since Sanity Checks are always good.

I had brought my dead tree copy of _Learning CFEngine 3_ since that's 
the similar (non Ruby) tool I was interested in, and one of the 
questions was if there was a testing framework similar to what Kevin was 
talking about.

It turns out there is.  At the very end of the book, there is:

6. Advanced Topics
	[...]
	CFEngine Testing				147
		Behavior Testing for CFEngine Policies	147
		Unit Testing for CFEngine Policies	148

I do not yet have the experience with or knowledge of the products to 
say this for sure, but my other thought with CFEngine is that it makes 
multiple passes per run to try to bring the system into compliance, and 
that it will report if things don't converge, so if you actually look at 
the reports that's a sanity check right there.  Separate tests are still 
good, if only to show that the converged result is what you actually 
intended.  I'd image that Chef has similar reports, and Kevin's talk was 
on a Chef testing framework...

My interest in Chef is for management of lots of devices that do not 
have Internet access (long story).  If/when I ever have time to really 
dive it and do anything with it, I'll do a preso.

Later,
JP
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