[Kde-games-devel] Regression testing

[Ian Wadham]

On Fri, 3 Jul 2009 12:53:26 am Mauricio Piacentini wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Jul 2009 12:16:13 am Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> > Yes, Plasma will show severe breakage with Qt 4.4. Lowering the
> > requirement is not an option if we want a functional desktop shell.
> >
> > In this case, I'd actually opt for removing kolf from the release. It's
> > not ideal and painful, but as it seems, we have to decide between a
> > broken Kolf and a broken Plasma, Kolf, with all due respect is less
> > critical for most of our users.
>
> You are correct, of course.
>
Yes, I reluctantly agree.  Kolf is no big thing in the general scheme of
things, but it has been around several years and perhaps has thousands
of users.  What if, next time, something like KMail, Konqueror or Amarok
is adversely affected.

Let us hope that the benefits Plasma receives outweigh the disappointment
and inconvenience to the Kolf users, who may have to stay on KDE 4.2- ...
or give up Kolf.  I also hope that the Qt 4.5 features incorporated into
Plasma were really "must have" and not just "nice to have".

> Notice that I am not saying that the app is perfect to start with, but
> if you look at the last releases each broke a different KDE game in a
> subtle way.
>
> And every time we had a problem in the last releases it was connected
> to a change in QGraphicsView, which has been sort of a moving target.
> KMahjongg and KGoldrunner, who used KGameCanvas, did not suffer from
> this.
>
True, but while rewriting KGoldrunner in the last 6 months I have come
across several examples of what I call "semantic drift".  The old code
compiled and built OK, but the meaning, functions and side effects of
some library methods had changed a bit ... sometimes this caused a
problem in the new code.  I am sorry I did not document these cases.
I preferred to just fix them and move on.  But an example still
outstanding is in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197686
and perhaps in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197687

> So I think it is time we lay out a plan to deal with these situations
> in the future. I would say we need to implement:
>
> a) Better (or any :)) regression testing at every Qt release.
> b) A policy where applications that have stayed in the module with no
> active maintainer for a given period of time need to be Q&A'd by the
> module maintainer, if no one else steps up. If problems can not be
> solved, they should probably be removed before the RC.
>
I heartily agree, Mauricio, except we might end up with no applications
at all ... ;-)

I keep wondering what would happen if someone wanted to build
a "real" application around Linux, Qt and KDE ... something like a
baggage-handling system for a major airport or even an educational
system for kids in Brazil ... :-)

All the best, Ian W.