problems working with bundletester

[Tim Penhey]

Hi folks,

tl;dr: lots of problems with bundletester, ping me on IRC

I have been spending several hours today trying to get bundletester
working properly, and a clean environment from which to run it.

Based on a clean trusty install, pip install bundletester fails.

The build failed due to missing python-dev package for the base bzr
install (using the old pip).

If I did 'sudo easy_install pip' first, at least it installed, but
failed to run due to a missing dependency of python-virtualenv.

Probably worth noting these two dependencies somewhere in the README for
bundletester.

I found that the current tests for the python-django charm start failing
with a recent (I'm running tip) juju due to a bug finally being fixed
where we stop reusing unit names for destroyed services.  What I mean is:

  deploy python-django gives python-django/0

destroy service removes it, then

  deploy python-django gives python-django/1 NOT python-django/0

the tests were assuming python-django/0

Another problem I hit was when I was using the jes feature flag with
juju.  This changes how the environment information is cached in the
.juju/environments directory.  This broke juju-deployer where it thought
that the environment wasn't running when it was.  I have added a card to
my team's kanban board to teach it, but worth noting.

The next problem I hit was getting the unit tests to run for
python-django that I had added.  The unit tests test the internal
methods of the hook executions. The install hook makes sure it installs
the semantic-version python package (using pip). I tried adding the
'check' makefile target to the bundletester test.yaml file, but it
failed as it couldn't find the semantic_version package.  Even though
bundletester says it creates a virtual environment, it doesn't do this
before it tries to run the makefile targets.  I don't know of a clean
way to add this other than 'sudo pip install semantic-version' in a
different make target to be called before 'check'. This does seem a bit
icky and I think that bundletester should make this easier to charm
authors to work with.

So, as you can see I have a litany of failures attempting to get this
working.

Can I get some advice or direction from someone who understands
bundletester better please?

Tim