Re: gtk regression test suite

[Jon Dowland <lists alcopop org>]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 08:02:40AM -0400, muppet wrote:
 
> This is likely to break code that expects that property to be an  
> object property.  You never know who is using these things.  

This is absolutely right - Federico raised this concern, and the first
test I talked about was an attempt to prove this.

> Would it  be reasonable to have the object property be a proxy for the
> style  proxy, to retain compatibility?

I think so - the current revision of my patch installs it as both a
g_object property and a GtkSetting. In honesty, I don't know what 'be a
proxy for the style property' means!

[Note that all revisions of my patch that use GtkSetting are broken in a
fundamental way - previous revisions which installed it as a gtk style
property appeared to work. I've yet to figure out why]

> The perl bindings[1] have an extensive API regression test suite[2].   
> This suite uses the standard perl test framework with some Gtk2- 
> related enhancements (auto-init of gtk+, and some helpers to make  
> deferred tests cleaner), and exists mainly to verify that we call the  
> bound APIs correctly.  That is, we test the validity of the bindings,  
> not the correctness of the bound API itself.
> ... 
> So, i can vouch for the usefulness of an automated suite, and point  
> to an example of how we set one up.

I have heard good things about perl's testing framework. I've never used
it from a developer end but I have had several pieces of software fail
to install as a result of their regression tests failing :-) I think it
would be an excellent idea to study their framework.

-- 
Jon Dowland
http://jon.dowland.name/
PGP fingerprint: 7032F238