rose suite-run: allow installation of complete suites

[arjclark]

We should support the ability to run another suite using a modified version of the rose-suite.conf file. (One possible use is for running rose stem suites which are stored with the source code.)

The idea is that you would define a suite containing a rose-suite.conf file (+ maybe a rose-suite.info file) which would contain an entry to install another suite, e.g:

[file:.]
source=/my/path/to/rose-stem

This doesn't work at present (because the top level suite dir contains other directories?). Another problem is that the suite you want to install may contain rose-suite.conf & rose-suite.info files which clash with the local versions.

[matthewrmshin]

Unfortunately, it looks like we are going to need an inheritance mechanism to solve this issue properly. See also #137. I'll write a new module around rose.config to load any Rose configuration with inheritance. The data model would contain:

• A ConfigNode loaded according to the linearised inheritance hierarchy.
• A list of files available from the linearised inheritance hierarchy.
• A list of the inheritance hierarchy, linearised.

Where appropriate:

• opts settings in a configuration file will be local to that configuration.
• The command line --opt-conf-key=KEY will be used by all configurations in the hierarchy. (It will ignore absences, unless a key is absent from every configurations in the hierarchy.)
• The command line --define=KEYS=VALUE option would be loaded last.

[matthewrmshin]

Basic functionality for inheriting suites under ~/roses/ and elsewhere in the file system has been in place since #962, but has not been documented or exposed to users. Do we still need (or want to support) this functionality? If so, do we need to extend this functionality to work with locations other than the file system? Otherwise, iIf there is no desire to support this functionality, we should consider closing this issue as a won't fix.

[arjclark]

I'm aware there are users installing parts of suites using the file install mechanism but beyond that I'm not sure (N.B. this is an issue I migrated from the old tracker rather than one I raised).

If there is undocumented functionality using this then I think it needs to be documented.

@dpmatthews - were you the original reporter of this?

[dpmatthews]

I still think this is would be useful but only if you can inherit a suite specified via a svn URL, not a file system location.