The Vagrant tests assumed that there’d be a user called “vagrant” that would run the tests and create the files by default. Files would be owned by vagrant:vagrant by default, and this worked, until it came time to change that username. The naïve method was a search-and-replace, but this caused problems when the new user’s name wasn’t exactly the same length as the previous one.
So to fix this, we now have our own user, named after the first animal I thought of, that makes the files’ owners and groups independent of the default user of whichever VM image the xtests are running on.
Another place where it was hard-coded was the home directory, which was “/home/vagrant”, where the awkward testcases live. That last one has been changed to just “/testcases”, which has no mention of the user in it.
There was a problem with the Vagrant tests where the year 2016 was hard-coded in as the modified date. This had to be done to make the --long tests use the correct date format, which varies depending on whether the timestamp is in the current year.
Unfortunately, time progresses [citation needed], and what was once 2016 is now 2017, so the date format changed and the tests broke.
Because the Vagrantfile is just a Ruby script, we can look up the current year at runtime and use that instead. There’s also a check added to the test runner that makes sure none of the files are more than 365 days old, because if any are, then it’s time to update the timestamps (or it’s the last day of a leap year)
See the README section for more details. Basically, with this way, we can store a bunch of existing valid exa outputs, change a VM's environment to match our values, then check that exa still works by comparing outputs.
