Improve test suite configuration

Currently test suite configuration (like whether debugging is enabled, and the path to the image to test) are stored among several global variables, and how they get their value is quite ad-hoc.

In the test/better-configuration branch I’ve made the situation a bit better and made it more well-defined and clearer (including documentation) how environment variables can be set to configure the test suite.

It also adds adds a local configuration file were these values can be set. The precedence between the different ways to set the variables (the file, shell environment, run_test_suite parameters) is now more well-defined and also documented.

The local configuration file is also the intended way to store secrets to be used in tests, currently only bridge lines. In the future we may end up storing secret credentials for web services we want to test without making those secrets public. For instance, to test git we may store something like:

GIT_SSH_URL=tails@git.tails.boum.org:test-repo
GIT_SSH_PUBLIC_KEY=ssh-rsa [...]
GIT_SSH_PRIVATE_KEY_SERIALIZED=-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n[...]

so we can automate the Git+SSH test using a real, live Git repo (as opposed what’s suggested in #6300 (closed)). We could have a canonical local configuration file to be used when testing new test releases.

Feature Branch: test/8188-better-test-suite-configuration

Related issues

• Related to #6301 (closed)

Original created by @anonym on 8188 (Redmine)