Tests might want to use there own options for specifying a file path,
while still using the abstract file access API. For example,
framework.CreateFromManifests might be used to create a mixture of
files under the repo root and from elsewhere. To support this,
absolute paths can now be given to the testfiles package and they will
be read directly.
The new test/e2e/framework/testfiles package makes it possible to
write tests that do not depend on a specific way of providing
additional test files at runtime. Such tests and the framework are
then more easily reused in other test suites.
In the test/e2e suite file access is enabled based on the existing
"repo-root" command line parameter and the built-in bindata. Tests
using the new API will first check for files under "repo-root" and
then fall back to the builtin data. This way, users of a test binary
can modify those files without having to rebuild the binary.
"repo-root" is still needed because at least some tests check for
additional files (secret.yaml, via ingress_utils.go) that are not part
of the upstream source code and thus may or may not be built into a
test binary.
Tests using bindata or repo-root directly get modified to use the new
API, or removed when they are obsolete: test/e2e/examples.go depended
on files that were removed in
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/61246 and thus can no
longer be run in Kubernetes. Moving the tests to kubernetes/examples
is tracked in https://github.com/kubernetes/examples/issues/214.
The file removal did not break the automated E2E testing probably
because the tests are under the Feature:Example tag and thus not
enabled during normal CI runs.
Removing also the obsolete tests makes it simpler to rework the
"repo-root" setting because less code uses it.
Related-to: #66649 and #23987
Patrick Ohly