[gnome-desktop-testing] Newbie news

[Tom Uijldert <tom uijldert gmail com>]

Hi,

Liked the idea of test automation a couple of weeks ago 		so I thought
I'd try to contribute.
Next comes the effort of getting mago to work...

1st attempt with Intrepid on eee-pc, found out:
- need at least python 2.6 (usage of 'with' without 'from __future__'
import).
- 'notfifier-daemon' which had changed its' name to 'notify-osd'.
- need for 'python-indicate' package which wasn't present in Intrepid.

This sort of gave me the hint that automation was targeted at Jaunty
exclusively so, on with the Jaunty upgrade.

Finally got that working, to find out:
- need to install python-pyxmpp
- need to install another python-pidgin binding (forgot which one
exactly).

Anyway, these things take -much- time to find out and prevents newbies
from getting up to speed fast.

Hence the following questions:
- is mago for Jaunty only (or Jaunty++)? or will there be a branch
maintained for older versions?
- shouldn't these requirements be documented and, better yet, explicitly
be tested for? It would have been a great timesaver if, for instance,
the code would explicitly check for which Ubuntu version its on, what
python-version, what packages are needed (per testable application) and
log that toward the tester beforehand.
Guessing it from python stackdumps wastes time...

Any thoughts on this, much appreciated.

Regards,
Tom.