testing-on-another-distro.md

Testing on another distro

You are trying to fix a test case that fails on Rocky Linux 8, but your development machine is Debian Stable.

It would be nice to have a way to quickly run make check on Rocky 8 locally, without needing to log to a remote machine. Here's how to do it.

Create a custom image

Create mycode.yaml in the Moncic-CI images directory:

extends: rocky8
forward-user: myusername
maintscript: |
   dnf install my-build-dependencies

Then run sudo monci bootstrap mycode --verbose and watch it being built.

This will also create a rocky8 OS image, and snapshot it as a base for mycode: that way you can have many custom distribution that snapshot the same base Rocky8 distribution.

Run make check

monci run can run an arbitrary command in a chroot, we'll use it to run make check:

sudo monci run mycode --workdir=. make check

This will run make check on the current directory, but in the mycode OS image.

You can also run make check on a freshly cloned copy of your repository:

sudo monci run mycode --clone=. make check

All these commands have a very quick startup time, so you can run this instead of make check as you try to debug your issue.

Using out of tree builds

Most compiled languages support building out of tree, and you can take advantage of this to have a build directory dedicated to Rocky Linux 8, different than the one you use for your local builds.

How to do it with meson:

sudo moncy run mycode -w . meson setup build-rocky8
sudo moncy run mycode -w . ninja -C build-rocky8

How to do it with cmake:

mkdir build-rocky8
sudo moncy run mycode -w build-rocky8 cmake ..
sudo moncy run mycode -w build-rocky8 make check

How to do it with autotools:

mkdir build-rocky8
sudo moncy run mycode -w build-rocky8 ../configure
sudo moncy run mycode -w build-rocky8 make check