Re: [QGIT RFC] Unit tests for QGit

From: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 17, 2008, 08:57 UTC
Message-ID: <e5bfff550808170157m45532428y3956e5d0d92e97d9@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20080808211318.GA4396@efreet.light.src>

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 10:13 PM, Jan Hudec <bulb@ucw.cz> wrote:

> Hello Marco and others,
>

Hi Jan,

  sorry to reply so late but I just returned from holiday (no PC there
due to it was severely forbidden by my boss aka wife :-)

Show 5 quoted lines

> I've been thinking about some refactoring of QGit since some time. And to be
> sure I don't screw up things too hard in the process, I thought about adding
> a test suite infrastructure first (and add some test cases for each think
> just before refactoring it).
>

That's interesting. I have NO experience on test suites for GUI applications (command line applications like git I would think are easier to setup some tests suite for)

Show 15 quoted lines

> The problem is, that implementing unittests means I need to compile
> 2 separate binaries -- qgit itself and the test -- using most (but not all)
> of the same sources. I see two ways to do it, so I'd like to ask which you
> consider cleaner:
>
>  1. Reorganize stuff so that a (static) library is created from all the
>    sources except qgit.cpp and than qgit.cpp is linked to this library to
>    create qgit and the tests are linked with it to provide the test runner.
>
>    Pros:
>     - The .pro files should remain reasonably simple.
>     - The sources are only compiled once.
>    Cons:
>     - Need to split the src directory to two, so bigger moving stuff around.
>

This is not a cons IMHO if it helps in separating tests from sources.

As I said I am no expert, but I would try to

- Let the test suite be easily stripped/not compiled for the
publishing (remember that we have to produce also that little
qgit_install.exe file used on *that* OS)

- Let the test be compiled only on demand (during developing I just
want to compile and run as few things as possible: C++ is already
quite bad in that regard and I don't want the situation get worst. BTW
I consider C++ slow compile times the biggest and probably only
drawback of C++ against C for big projects)

- Try to find some literature/reference before starting coding. As I
said I am no expert of GUI testing, so I would probably try to find
some Qt projects that use it and see/ask the developers how they
managed to do that and what are the problems. Then try to be stick to
known best practice (read someone that has DONE that in a REAL
project, not someone that has WRITTEN about that in a paper or a
vendor marketing/documentation)

Anyhow I'm really interested in this thing, and hope to see your work soon. Please feel free to drop me a line for any help you think I can give you.

Bye Marco