Hey @flokli, thanks a lot for your guidance so far. I think I have trimmed everything to the bare minimum at this point, but I have a bunch of questions that I would need your guidance on, whenever you have some time 🙏🏻 Thanks in advance.

What would be the best way to test all of this? Do I need to write some tests, and if so what do we want to actually test here? I really haven't had an opportunity to figure out testing just yet, so appreciate any help on this.

What would be the best way to test all of this? Do I need to write some tests, and if so what do we want to actually test here? I really haven't had an opportunity to figure out testing just yet, so appreciate any help on this.

We have a bunch of tests in nixos/tests, which you can simply run by nix-build'ing them. Maybe a good way to start would be the systemd-initrd-* ones (make sure to confirm they did succeed before). That should give you an idea if there's any major regressions.

Just a small progress update: I am continuing to work on this, just having some trouble running tests and verifying everything (due to my LXC set-up), so needed to build a VM and a bit of infra to be able to test this properly and will come back with the results at some point soon-ish, time permitting.

So I've got a system running NixOS now, so I can run the tests, but I am having a problem building the test dependencies to be able to run the tests:

=================================== FAILURES ===================================
_________________________ TestLexers.testIPythonLexer __________________________

self = <IPython.lib.tests.test_lexers.TestLexers testMethod=testIPythonLexer>

    def testIPythonLexer(self):
        fragment = '!echo $HOME\n'
        tokens = [
            (Token.Operator, '!'),
        ]
        tokens.extend(self.bash_lexer.get_tokens(fragment[1:]))
>       self.assertEqual(tokens, list(self.lexer.get_tokens(fragment)))
E       AssertionError: Lists differ: [(Tok[78 chars] (Token.Name.Variable, '$HOME'), (Token.Text.Whitespace, '\n')] != [(Tok[78 chars] (Token.Name.Variable, '$HOME'), (Token.Text, '\n')]
E       
E       First differing element 4:
E       (Token.Text.Whitespace, '\n')
E       (Token.Text, '\n')
E       
E         [(Token.Operator, '!'),
E          (Token.Name.Builtin, 'echo'),
E          (Token.Text.Whitespace, ' '),
E          (Token.Name.Variable, '$HOME'),
E       -  (Token.Text.Whitespace, '\n')]
E       ?             -----------
E       
E       +  (Token.Text, '\n')]

IPython/lib/tests/test_lexers.py:25: AssertionError

Which seems to be a problem between pygments 2.14.0 and ipython <8.8.

How would one normally deal with this? Just disable the offending tests for now as they're completely unrelated to the change? Or do I just cherry-pick my change on top of the current stable channel (so I can use prebuilt dependencies) and test thing that way? Any ideas @flokli?

Sorry for the delay in replying. I think you've been bitten by another unrelated regression in staging, which might be very unstable sometimes (that's what we use the staging-next stabilization cycles for).

In these cases, it's probably easiest to test your changes by cherry-picking these commits on top of master (pushed to a separate branch, but still keep the PR open as-is), and once you're happy with the results, merge this PR.

Hey @flokli, I think I have reached the point where we can start getting ready to merge this. Do you want me to test or verify anything else before? Or do I make this PR ready for review and we work from there?

@filakhtov thanks! Yes, this looks pretty good now. I think we should be running some more tests (installer tests, systemd-initrd* tests), to make sure there's no new test failures (some of these might already be broken currently).

If there's no new regressions, fine for me to merge this :-)

Hey @flokli thank you very much for bearing with me on this, as well as for your support and guidance! 🙇🏻‍♂️

Testing with withPam = false in systemdStage1

• [root@nixos:~/nixpkgs]# nix-build -A nixosTests.installer-systemd-stage-1.simple
• [root@nixos:~/nixpkgs]# nix-build -A nixosTests.initrdNetwork
• [root@nixos:~/nixpkgs]# nix-build -A nixosTests.initrd-network-ssh
• [root@nixos:~/nixpkgs]# nix-build -A nixosTests.installer-systemd-stage-1.simpleSpecialised

Let's get this in, and deal with any further regressions during the next stabilization cycle. This is probably better tested than some other staging changes ;-)

Thanks a lot for the work!