Description

The RIOT testing system uses the shell quite extensively. While this is in itself a good idea, the current embodiment has a few issues:

• A few bug in the shell.
• Lack of a programmatic way of interacting with it (this was pointed out before in Programmatic shell access #4967,) It would be desirable to have a library for interacting with the shell that can also be used from the testing scripts
• The build system / OS integration, via tools like pyterm which modify the input and output.
• Parsing is done by each test scripts via pexpect. Without strict restrictions on what to expect (and in particular which output to reject) a common failure mode of tests is to time out waiting for text that is never going to show up.

The plan is to:

• Fix the bugs.
• Remove the requirement for pyterm, in favour of a dumber terminal (if someone needs command history, there is rlwrap for that.)
• Write a module that abstracts shell interaction.
• Define and implement an easily parseable format for command output.
• Integrate all of that into the testing infrastructure.

Breakdown

• Fix shell bugs
  • sys/stdio_uart: do not cast function pointer. sys/stdio_uart: do not cast function pointer. #10312
  • sys/shell: ensure character is flushed when echoing. sys/shell: ensure character is flushed when echoing. #10630
  • sys/shell: correctly detect and handle long lines sys/shell: correctly detect and handle long lines #10635 sys/shell: correctly detect and handle long lines #13195
• Easily parseable commands:
  • doc/rdm: RDM on a common api for testing doc/rdm: RDM on a common api for testing #10624
• Self describing interfaces
  • sys/app_metadata: Add a way to print application metadata sys/app_metadata: Add a way to print application metadata #10961
  • sys/optparse: Add command line parser. sys/optparse: Add command line parser. #9538