Re: gnome-shell-list Digest, Vol 29, Issue 49

[Oliver Mangold <o mangold googlemail com>]

> Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2011 07:36:58 -0700
> From: Jeffery Olson<olson jeffery gmail com>
> To: gnome-shell-list gnome org
> Subject: mutter tiling
> Message-ID:
> 	<AANLkTimUL4XJLB2rZV7EDfvCVSn7soqmkNjnnLEhX9MT mail gmail com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> The risk that you're describing, there's a set of tools you can
> develop to hedge against this very eventuality. They're called unit
> tests. This is probably a textbook example for why unit tests are
> important, especially in a dynamic language environment.
First, I'm sorry, if this thread stepped some people on the feet. I 
didn't want to say nobody should use Javascript in general for plugins. 
I just think anybody should be allowed to use the language he wants. If 
you like Javascript this is okay with me.

But to reply to your statement above, I do not think that unit testing 
for GUI-heavy code is practical, because you cannot let the testing 
framework do the user actions necessary to reach certain segments of 
code. Of course you can build workarounds, by calling methods directly, 
triggering signals yourself, etc., but this will become painful. I 
personally don't want to go through this, just to have something that I 
get with a statically typed language for free. But maybe this is just 
taste. As I said, anyone should use the framework he likes best.

> To this end, I'll even volunteer up my repo for the tiling window
> management extensive I've been working on (but didn't feel was ready
> for a release, yet). It's very rough and needs docs, still (and I
> believe it needs to be updated to the latest gnome-shell release in
> the metadata.json.. I haven't messed with it in a few weeks) :
>
> https://github.com/olsonjeffery/shellshock
>
> I used to have a custom mutter branch with the C-extensions I needed
> to make this extension work, but I believe my changes have been
> accepted as patches, so it should work ootb. It's very rough around
> the edges, still. But it's a start, I think. And everything needed to
> have automatic tiling (the workspace added/removed events, window
> add/remove events, etc) is all there in the gnome-shell API, just not
> wired in.
>
> If anyone's interested in learning more about the code I've submitted
> and how to leverage it, I can try and add some README info.
Thanks, good to know that there is already something. I will certainly 
check it out.