Making testdrive work pt.1 A brief recent history

When i joined the Ubuntu QA team one of my biggest problems was the lack of a hub program for iso testing, it turned our we did have one, called testdrive, but it had not been supported for at least 2 years.

I used the testdrive daily and soon found a rather large bug, it wouldn’t open ISOs in Virtualbox 4.2. I filed the bug and upon showing a few others the problem, it was discovered that a patch for this problem was rather simple. Unit193 (i don’t know his real name) was able to get it working in about 1 minute with a change that required about 30 new characters in the code. It was quickly uploaded as a patch but we still needed to get it into the program.

After a month of phill whiteside talking to the SRU team and both of us trying to contact the original testdrive devs, we finally got the patch into testdrive. It was the first new release in over a year. Shortly after that, testdrive became active again.

In the time leading up to beta 2 for 13.04 a new bug had appeared where every iso had two entries, i added it to my now rather long list of bugs in testdrive, but this time many other members of the QA team helped.

Howard chan suggested that the QA team take over maintenance, which was widely regarded as a good idea. quickly, many of us got involved with making it better.

While i learned python so i could help with code, Howard added Kubuntu active (and since has added more ISOs to testdrive) and Sergio Meneses worked with one of the original devs to get the two entries bug fixed. Both have been added to the main testdrive branch and where released in version 3.20.

3.20 is likely the version that will be released with Ubuntu 13.04

Off-topic, we need your help to get 13.04 ready, if you have any spare time, please come and help the QA team.

• Testdrive