On 2017-04-28 05:35 PM, Lex Trotman wrote:
On 29 April 2017 at 09:55, Matthew Brush <mbr...@codebrainz.ca> wrote:
On 2017-04-28 02:35 PM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
Am 27.04.2017 um 22:51 schrieb Vasiliy Faronov:
Hi all,
From discussions elsewhere, such as [1], it sounds like one of the
things holding back Geany development right now is a need for more
testing.
Helping to test PRs is truly needed, and much appreciated.
However, I do think that Geany lacks also actual developers that cna
merge stuff. I feel the current team is afraid of merging non-trivial
changes, leaving even semi-complex patches to Colomban. Unfortunately
Colomban has little time these days, too, so we're kind of stuck. There
are lots of PRs that have recent activity from the authors and are
tested appropriately but still don't get attention from developers.
My general problem is that we don't have a unstable/development branch per
se, nor proper automated testing, and I don't want to break master so I
won't merge a single thing without testing it thoroughly myself. This can
turn a 5-10 minute merge into a several hours or more testing session,
requiring special setups and re-compiling Geany on 3 different OSes, etc.
I have to agree with Matthew that:
1. Nobody wants to break master because its what everybody is using.
Problem is that if we had a development branch nobody would be using
it because it might break, so its insufficiently tested. I don't have
a solution to that.
2. I am more willing to accept others testing and to make a judgement
call about testing on all platforms. I have used that approach
successfully on other projects where I couldn't personally test some
configurations. But I understand where Matthew is coming from
regarding the amount of work to do a good testing job.
3. A thorough test is becoming too big a job, and that is even worse
for the more complex PRs that Thomas mentions. Simply don't have the
time. And for changes to the plugin interface that need a plugin to
test, well, unless the OP provides such a plugin, it just isn't going
to happen.
Travis CI is great, but unless it can run make check with loads of static
analysis and runtime analysis while it runs unit tests and such, it's
basically just saying the code compiles. As we all know, it's relatively
easy to make C code that compiles but crashes horribly at runtime in weird
corner cases (off by one, null deref, etc.).
Personally I'd feel a lot better merging PRs I haven't thoroughly tested if
we had:
- Clang static analyzer during the build
- A Git hook or manual use of clang-format or other formatter to prevent
the "extra white space" or "wrong comment style" type of issues that
commonly occur in PRs.
- Ability for PRs to come with tests (requires testing support).
- Linking in Clang's address & memory sanitizers while running all of the
tests.
Geany is almost entirely an interactive application, so until
interactive tests are possible I don't think technical tests like
these will add a great deal to the committability of PRs.
If the tests just test functions, all it needs is to get Geany started
up, then the tests can call the new/changed functions testing with
different inputs and such. There are at least two PRs to do similar.
Clangalizers and sanitizers and formatters won't tell you that the PR
actually puts 'z' in the buffer instead of 'a'.
No, but they'll catch a number of runtime bugs that are often hard to
identify upon basic code inspection or manual testing.
Perhaps Columban knows more about using the accessibility framework
for testing now Scintilla supports it?
There are several UI testing frameworks that work with GTK+, though I've
not used any: autopilot, dogtail, and LDTP.
I don't think we really need fully automatic UI testing (seems like too
much work), but we could get a long way just testing at the function
level, ensuring functions uphold their contract and flexing them with
unusual inputs. Making a testable function usually means writing it
better too, avoiding global state and writing more "pure" functions, and
making functions do one thing and not writing huge functions or many
small functions.
Regards,
Matthew Brush
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