gtk regression test suite

[Jon Dowland <lists alcopop org>]

I've been working on a small patch for GTK+ which changes a
GtkScrolledWindow property to be a style property (or GtkSetting)[1].
This has been both to `scratch an itch' and to begin learning my way
around GTK+ with a view to future hacking.

There have been two noteable problems so far that I have been able to
diagnose with the help of test cases (one of which is in bugzilla[2],
the rest are pending addition).

Constructing these test cases led me to look at the current GTK testing
framework. I see ./tests/ underneath the source tree, which looks to me
like these are tests to run on an ad-hoc basis to determine whether
things look correct visually.  None of these appear to be regression
tests, i.e. non-interactive with a pass/fail return value. The GTK+
manual describes the gtk-demo program, which looks like it is used by
end-users to test that they've built GTK+ correctly.  (please enlighten
me if I'm mis-representing these).

I was wondering if there was any interest amongst the GTK+ hackers to
investigate creating a regression test suite. I think API changes and
not-API-changes-but-similar (like [1]) could be caught with such a
framework. I'm not experienced enough with the GTK+ internals to know
how appropriate a non-interactive suite would be for the rest of the
toolkit, but an interactive one (e.g. `click ok if the scrollbar is on
the left, cancel otherwise') is also feasible.



[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157025
[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=47003&action=view


Yours,

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