Automatic X testing tool

[Daniel Veillard <Daniel Veillard w3 org>]

  This might be just a crazy idea, but one of the problem for
debugging graphical apps are:
  - difficulty to check all sequences of events an user may generate
    especially those "why did you do that ?" class of user interractions.
  - difficulty to fill up bugs reports about the excat sequence who
    led to the problem
  - difficulty to try to reproduce such a sequence

I was thinking about an X-Window event generator coupled with a minimal
framework to record (and restart events) and the minimal logic needed to:
  - generate and replay event sequences
  - keep track of the debugged application status (like exit status code,
    or core-files).
  - keep track of the existing window opened by the given application
    to schedule the flow of event on those
  - if possible the glue needed to attach gdb to the process being
    debugged when a given sequence kill the program.

 I think that a simple version of such a tool could be a good project
of the week. Asking to people around at Guadec it didn't sound completely
stupid. And this may help Gnome (and actually virtually any X program)
being a bit more fool proofed. Even if it may not be able to detect
very complex interraction bugs, at least some basic bugs could be discovered
that way. The kind of bugs that your mother may pop out immediately
if she get her hands on you bleeding edge Gnome Desktop :-)

  Candidates ? Opinion ?

Daniel

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