Re: [gnome-love] wanted: php or cgi programmer with some spare time to help with gnome test spec

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

Mario, Todd, Thiago, anyone else interested: 
It shouldn't be much work; basically three or four php pages. Perl is
definitely optional, but might be useful. 

To be more clear on what's wanted:
http://primates.ximian.com/~louie/gnome_test_specs/evolution/
http://primates.ximian.com/~louie/gnome_test_specs/evolution/mail/mail_gen/

is what the current interface looks like. As you can see, there is a big
hierarchy there- dozens of subdirs and hundreds of tests in evolution
alone, nearly 2000 tests in all.

Currently, all those pages are static html generated partially by
scripts (all the indexes) and partially by hand (all the actual tests.)
This makes updating and maintaining things a royal pain. 

So... given that we can't rewrite the top level data files (which are
all of this format):
http://primates.ximian.com/~louie/gnome_test_specs/evolution/mail/mail_gen/func_mail01.html

what I'm hoping one of you can come up with is a new interface that
(1) uses the old data files and the current reporting script.
 
(2) is dynamically created, so that if someone just adds a new test
file, new test directory, or new test component the new addition just
'shows up' without having to run multiple scripts. This'll make it
easier for gnome QA volunteers and/or module maintainers to write and
create their own tests.

(3) avoids the use of popups to display crucial information, so that
using the interface itself will be less painful. Right now, having to
open and close a new window for each individual test makes large scale
testing a PITA. 

I mentioned perl because the 'ideal' solution would
(1) re-parse all of the HTML test files (like func_mail01 above) into a
more sane format like text or XML (which would probably best be done in
perl.) 
(2) re-write the ksh reporting functions in perl, or maybe php, to make
it more portable, extensible, etc.

but these can be done independently of the front-end work, so if no perl
volunteers are stepping forward right now that's fine.

Anyway, I hope that makes my goals for the update/rewrite a bit more
clear- I really think that having a better test infrastructure is
crucial to making gnome more mature, and having a better web front end
to the tests Sun has given us will be a big step towards that. So,
thanks!
Luis

P.S. If this is still unclear, of course, I'm totally open to sharing
more ideas and more of my experience with the test suite. 
P.P.S. In case some of you are not familiar with CVS, I've put a tarball
of the current test_specs at
http://primates.ximian.com/~louie/gnome_test_specs.tgz




On Sat, 2001-12-01 at 22:46, fflewddur wrote:
> well, i don't have much perl experience, and i've never messed with cgi
> at all, but i do know a fair amount about php.  what exactly would be
> involved, and do you have any ideas on how to get started?  i've been
> looking for a way to help out the gnome2 effort, so if no one better
> qualified feels like doing this, i'd be glad to give it a try.
>
> todd
>
> On Sat, 2001-12-01 at 15:19, Luis Villa wrote:
> > So... in gnome cvs* there is a wonderful test spec suite written by Sun,
> > designed to allow the gnome community to easily and reproducibly test
> > gnome components. 
> >
> > The problem is that the spec was written by very good QA people who
> > aren't exactly web experts- all pages are static and generated with awk
> > and shell, and the cgis are in ksh. This makes it much more difficult to
> > expand and maintain the test spec than it could/should be.
> >
> > So... I'm calling for someone (or a group of someones) with some perl
> > CGI and/or php experience to rewrite the html portion of the spec to
> > make it more maintainable and usable. This could conceivably involve
> > writing as few as _three_ pages, depending on how you want to do it, so
> > for someone with a fair amount of experience this could be a really
> > quick project.
> >
> > If anyone has any questions and/or thoughts and/or time to volunteer
> > please drop me a note and I'll be happy to help explain the test spec
> > system and where a good rewrite might start.
> >
> > Thanks-
> > Luis Villa
> > Ximian Bugmaster
> >
> > *gnome_test_spec module
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-love mailing list
> > gnome-love gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-love