So I don't think there's any UAL work required here. So going to mark as
invalid. Feel free to add other bug tasks as needed.
** Changed in: ubuntu-app-launch
Status: New => Invalid
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1376423
Title:
There is no easy and future-proof way of starting an app in a clean
environment
Status in Ubuntu Application Launcher:
Invalid
Bug description:
For manual and automated testing we generally need to be able to start
the applications in a clean environment, in a way that the tests are
not affected by existing files and configurations. And as the tests
should be easily runnable on the devs development machines, the
changes made while running the tests should not affect the real
environment.
In the past we were able to get a reasonably clean environment setting
the value of $HOME to a temporary directory.
Now this is not enough by a variety of reasons, like a hierarchy of
dirs in HOME needed by app armor, apps being launched by upstart, and
services that keep listening to the previous value of HOME.
Every test suite has solved this on it's own why, some use the real
environment but backup the existing files (which is really bad), some
patch the HOME and keep adding details every time something changes,
and some others just pollute the real environment and can't be run on
a dev machine. This is what has been causing failures on the majority
of autopilot tests for the last month.
Instead of keep doing these multiple solutions, and keep adjusting
them every time they stop working; I think we need to find one single
way that works for all the apps. And we need to add automated tests
for this single way to make sure that no new releases will break it.
I'm currently thinking of a testability helper in ubuntu-app-launch
that we call to launch an app and it will make sure that it will start
all the needed XDG vars pointing to a clean temporary environment. We
might still need to restart some services, and we might hit some other
problems, but this is just an idea. Feel free to propose alternatives.
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