[Sugar-devel] Sugarbot working on latest Sugar

[Sascha Silbe]

Excerpts from Tim McNamara's message of Sun Aug 08 02:06:21 +0200 2010:

> Is there interest in pushing an updated sugarbot to git.sl.o?

Sure, go ahead! If you need commit rights, please write to systems@ and
I'll transfer the project to you. The original author, a GSoC student,
has already stated having no interest to work on it any further.

> I have spent some time over the last three days getting Sugarbot to run in
> sugar-jhbuild. After a few code changes, and lots of reading, I have been
> successful.

Great! And thanks for working on this. Automated UI testing is our most
pressing need right now (IMO at least). It enables faster, easier and
better testing of code changes (including upstream changes).

> Think... Sugarbot's widget identification system worked well when text-based
> labels were common place. Recent Sugar versions have moved to a highly
> icon-based naming system. Developers will either need to make use
> of gtk.Widget.set_name() or another widget identification algorithm will
> need to be established.
> 
> There are several things under the hood that I think would be useful. I
> think some of what I would like to do would be classed as code style
> changes, rather than substantive though.

I don't have time to answer more in-depth, but one thing I'd like to
point out is that Gnome is using dogtail for UI testing which seems to
be rather similar to SugarBot so we might want to use that instead. IIRC
it even comes with some tools to make writing tests easier (a "macro
recorder" thingie and a widget tree exploration GUI). As much as I'd hate
to see a GSoC project being never put into real use, the advantage of
having someone else maintain the code is rather important for now.
But maybe we can reuse some code or ideas from SugarBot to make it easier
to write test cases for activities?

Sascha

--
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 490 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20100811/9ff54329/attachment.pgp