Re: [Nix-dev] Re: New ISO image expression and automated testing.

[Michael Raskin]

> What kind of errors are we trying to catch?  Things like missing files
> or broken scripts?

Anything that prevents the testing condition from being true. 
Testing condition: 
  Optical disk expression produces an image that allows to easily 
  install NixOS with [list features used in install-script.sh], 
  the installation goes normally and terminates successfully; 
  resulting system boots, launches networking, and is capable of 
  running added service.

For example, our GRUB issues would be caught.

> Do such errors result in non-termination (e.g., a broken script fails,
> but then the system doesn't reboot/halt)?

There is at least one failure type that will always result in non-termination (I mean Nix bug that causes infinite loop). Also I see no way to tell Qemu that it should terminate if the image passed is non-bootable. Yes, I could check for nixos-install returning error and halt there, but it would catch not all hangs anyway. Broken bootable installs are also very hard to detect. So yes, it wither terminates successfully or hangs.