The GNOME-Continuous  continuous integration and delivery system has been helping us to keep the quality of the GNOME code base up for a while now.

It is doing a number of things:

• Builds changed modules
• Creates vm images that can be downloaded for local testing
• Smoke-tests the installed image  by verifying that it boots up to the login screen
• Runs  more than 400 tests against the installed image
• Launches all the applications that are part of the moduleset and takes screenshots of them

All of this happens after every commit, or at least very close to that, and the results are available at the build.gnome.org website.

You can learn more about GNOME-Continuous here.

As a member of the the GNOME release team I am really thankful for this service, it has made our job a lot easier – at release time everything just builds and works most of the time nowadays.

Earlier this year, we’ve made the smoke-testing aspect of gnome-continuous more useful by verifying not just GNOME, but also GNOME Classic and GNOME on Wayland.

Today, we’ve had a minor breakthrough: for the first time, the GNOME/Wayland smoke test succeeded all the way to taking a screenshot of the session.

(of course, GNOME on Wayland looks just like GNOME under X11, so the screenshot is not very exciting by itself).

To get this far, we had to switch to the egl-drm branch of mesa, which adds support for running KMS+DRM GL applications with QXL.