It should now be possible to use the RC system and in particular the setup_daq script, which takes as an argument a user script which can be run once the system has been initialised according to the configuration. So with move to tdaq-01-06 maybe this is a good idea. Originally wasn't possible as IS servers had to be treated differently.
Test scripts
The current system works using Makefiles to run the setup.sh, run.sh and teardown.sh scripts in different directories.
Using setup_daq takes the place of the individual setup.sh and teardown.sh scripts, as well as the top-level scripts in SystemTests/scripts.
It should be possible to run all the tests within the same instance of setup_daq. It may be possible to all tests without cycling down from initial between a test. In the AnalysisTests?, a restartIS script is called and each program is restarted for each test...
System configuration database
In order to run the system with different settings (eg log files in the SystemTests folder) it seems to be necessary to make a copy of the whole (SCT) configuration directory. You can't change TDAQ_DB_PATH to override particular config files.
Archiving Service
The Archiving Service by default seems to look for files in the current directory, and this is used by several of the tests to load data. Unfortunately, with setup_daq the working directory is specified in the config, which needs to stay the same as much as possible between tests.
Current solution, copy the files to a known directory and run ArchivingService there.