12 Oct 2005
October 12th, 2005 — pborAutomated GUI tests
After the announce of dogtail I played a bit with it and with LDTP. I am far from an expert in testing automation, but I really think that this kind of technology will substantially improve the quality of our releases. For instance I started to collect some test cases ideas for gedit in the hope to have a good regression testing when switching from the aging but very well tested codebase to the new one. With both dogtail and LDTP I was bitten by the fact that the app needs to be launched with the english locale to work, but apart from that both seem to work (the start of a very simple wrapper for writing dogtail tests in gedit can be found here)
However I can’t help but feel disappointed by the presence of two projects so similar… I read the FAQ, I read the mailing lists etc: as an independent I’d still prefer to have one and blessed testing system throughout GNOME and just to concentrate on the testcases rather than writing this blog entry. If there are technical differences maybe it would be better to discuss which is the best approach and merge the efforts. Don’t get me wrong, competition is often a good thing, but in this case it still leaves a sour RH-vs-Novell taste in my mouth.
gedit status
new_mdi progresses slowly but steadily: asynchronous saving is a bit painful, especially when coupled with closing a modified document, but it’s worth the effort. Among other things we now gained recoverable saving errors. We’ll soon merge the branch to HEAD in order to get more testing. Nice to see lots of interest for the python plugin api both on the mailing list and in #gedit. Write your python plugin today, it’s easy and fun (some examples here). if you need a crackrock idea to get started just ask (vi-like command bar anyone…)
