Re: GTK+ test suite

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

[
 This would be best discussed on gtk-devel-list, so I've
 set the reply to point to that list.
] 

Dermot McCluskey <Dermot McCluskey ireland sun com> writes:

> I work in the Desktop Test Team at Sun.  As you may
> know, Sun has joined the GNOME Foundation and is
> adopting GNOME as the future desktop for Solaris.
> 
> We are planning to develop a verification test suite
> for GTK+.  This test suite could be used to check the
> stability of a particular build of GTK+ and to find bugs.
> We are currently putting together a team to work on
> this project.
> 
> Our plan is to check the code in to the CVS tree at
> gnome.org as soon as we have something usable.
> 
> Some of the areas to be tested will include:
> - completeness of header files

Hmmm, I'm not sure what this means quite...

> - ability to create all standard (non-deprecated) widgets;
>   check default properties are set correctly;
>   get and set standard properties;
>   receive expected callbacks; etc

So the idea here is to drive the widgets via their introspectable
interface? Certainly quite a bit of testing can be done this way,
though it probably will be as much testing the glue between the
property system and the core itself.

> - expected behavior and return values from library functions

I assume this would involve writing specific test cases.
 
These ideas sound like a reasonable start. I have very little
experience in doing automated testing of toolkits, so I'd
probably have to see things in action to know how it will work.

> The execution of the test suite will be automated - there will
> be no manual intervention or inspection involved.  We plan to
> use the TET test harness to control builds, execution, journal
> files and results tabulation.  A suitable open source version
> of TET3 is available from The Open Group (tetworks.opengroup.org).

Can you provide some more details on TET - I was unable to find
out anything useful from the web page without registering to
download. 

In particular:

 - What are the details of the license? (The Open Group has a 
   history of being unable to get its act together on open
   license...) 

 - What platforms does it run on? I saw mention on the web site
   of Win32 and Java...

Thanks,
                                        Owen