My journey at Linux System Roles with GSoC

Posted on 2020-08-27 , by Elvira

Linux System Roles are a collection of roles and modules that assist Linux administrators in the configuration of GNU/Linux subsystems through Ansible. There are roles for managing different parts of the systems such as selinux, storage and networking.

Improving the Network Linux System Role

My main objective was to improve the Network Linux System Role. Although my proposal covered the many different tasks that were suggested for the project, my mentors and I decided to better focus on improving the integration testing of the project. Therefore, most of my contributions were related to this matter. Adding Pytest as an integration testing tool is the most remarkable addition to the project. Below you can see the detailed list of my contributions:

Merged PRs

Started before 1st May, 2020:

PR207 - Separate debug and info logs from warnings: Fixes Issue 29.

After 1st May, 2020:

PR226 - Update contributing.md with steps to contributing.
PR223 - Change ethtool features to use underscores. Refers to Issue 206. The role now accepts properties written with underscores or dashes, and fails if both options are mixed.
PR237 - Fail if state and persistent_state are incompatible: Fixes Issue 205.
PR251 - Fix error message format.
PR260 - Add Pytest integration tests: This PR contains two different commits. The first one creates the script for testing and the mocking of the Ansible runtime. The second one consists of playbooks that allow Pytest to run in the project-internal test-harness. The test-harness allows the execution of these tests in different Linux distributions such as CentOS, Fedora and RHEL.

Todo

There are some tasks that still need to be finished. The most important is to add Python 2 support to the Pytest integration testing, which is needed to be able to test older releases of THEL or CentOS. After that, I also want to finish Issue 206 by adding warnings when a deprecated property is used.

🌤️ Summer is ending… 🌤️

It has been an intense but rewarding summer, and I’ve learnt a lot. I’ve been able to work directly with awesome professionals. I’m willing to continue contributing to Linux System Roles and to improve my skills as a software engineer!!

Thanks to Fedora and all the mentors. Thanks to Till for being so understanding and patient with me. I really appreciate all the time you have dedicated to my mentoring.