Regression tests?

[Patrick Spinler]

I believe a few people on the wine-devel list have looked at doing this,
but I don't recall what, if anything, they produced.  To the best of my
knowledge, there is no other free software effort available for testing
GUI applications.

A simplistic idea would work something like this: 
  *) Start your app under Xvfb  (probably w/o a window/session manager)
  *) Feed that application a stream of x events captured by something
like xev.
  *) At defined checkpoints, compare the Xvfb screen (provided as a
filesystem file in xwd format) against precaptured screens.  If more
than X% different, flag an error and abort the test.

Eventually you'd want to do something more sophisticiated, but this
would get you started.  The missing peices:
  *) An event capture program (should be non-hard change to xev)
  *) An event replay program with screen checkpoint & pause/timing
capabilities

I've been interested in this field for some time.  I'd probably try to
leverage something like the greg framework
(http://freshmeat.net/projects/greg) which is already in guile. :-)

-- Pat

Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> 
> Dan Kegel writes:
>  > Could something similar be done for gnucash?  Would it help
>  > make crash bugs less likely?
> 
> One of the problems with that is that the majority of crashes seem to
> come from GUI code.  Writing  test scripts for a GUI is rather more
> difficult than writing them for server code.
> 
> It's probably something that gnome is going to have to look at, though
> - a testing framework to allow scripts to operate GUI's would not be a
> bad thing.
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Robert Merkel                              rgmerk@mira.net
> 
> "We are excited and optimistic about its usage going
> forward and, yes, we can teach penguins the military
> close-order drill", Mark Norton, US Department of Defense.
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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