Guide for creating new AppInstall tests

Austin English austinenglish at gmail.com
Mon Dec 28 17:57:46 CST 2009


On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Sam S. <smls75 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Wine team!
>
> After reading the introduction to AppInstall at
> http://www.winehq.org/wwn/360, I decided to try and write some
> additional application tests for it.
> There are at least two freely downloadable win32 apps that I run with
> Wine, that have in the past (in my experience) been quite sensitive to
> small improvements/regressions in certain areas of wine (gecko engine
> and opengl, namely), so having them automatically tested daily could
> be useful...
>
> Unfortunately, however, the wiki page
> (http://wiki.winehq.org/Appinstall) doesn't really provide a guide for
> how to go about doing this...
> It explains the text that will need to be put in the actual test
> script (which I could have also figured out by looking at the
> well-documented example scripts), but almost nothing about how you
> need to set up your working environment, what files to put where,
> which commands to call, etc, for the purpose of writing/testing a new
> AppInstall script from scratch.

I wrote Appinstall, as well as the documentation. While I agree it
could be made more useful, it had the usual problem of the developer
and users not communicating enough. I sent drafts of the documentation
to wine-users and wine-devel, but received few comments on what to
change/clarify/add. I'll work on the wiki in a bit, and the
documentation on winezeug itself. It would be even better if you could
e-mail me off list and point out what needs work. Or rewrite it to be
clearer, from a user's perspective ;-).

> In absence of such a guide, I just downloaded the whole
> http://winezeug.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/appinstall directory, copied
> it into a Windows XP environment (because according to the WWN
> article, you're supposed to write the tests on Windows), and started
> by duplicating one of the example files.
> However, when I open a Command Prompt window and try to run one of the
> .ahk files with AutoHotKey, nothing really happens - all I see is some
> additional Command Prompt windows popping up for a split second and
> disappearing again, and then the command returns - nothing downloaded,
> no output, no error messages, nothing. (Btw, I don't even understand
> where the dowloads specified in the scripts are supposed to end up...)

Which script did you run? Most activity is logged to the log file
(%APPINSTALL%\testname-result.txt=C:\appinstall\testname-result.txt),
not stdout. Those command prompts opening and closing are most likely
sha1sum's being calculated for installed files.

> How am I supposed to do this?

The downloads, as well as log files, go to C:\appinstall, by default.
This is explained on the wiki.

> More generally: Could someone who knows how to do this maybe put up a
> step-by-step guide for users who want to contibute by writing new
> AppInstall tests, with no prior knowledge? Possibly something along
> the lines of:
>
>  - what/how do download

Not sure exactly what you mean here. The wiki explains you need the
Appinstaller files, and your program's installer/executable.

>  - on Windows: what files to put where / how to set up the environment

This should be clearer, but most of it is documented either on the
wiki/by reading the examples.

>  - on Windows: how to create a new test-script / where to put it

The test script can be anywhere, as long as the two include files are
in the same directory. Should be clearer.

>  - on Windows: how to get all those checksums

There's not an easy way on windows, without installing cygwin. This is
explained in the wiki.

>  - on Windows: how to properly test-run/debug the new script

By running it a few times and making sure nothing fails ;-).

>  - on Linux+Wine: what files to put where / how to set up the environment

Same as windows. Doesn't matter, as long as yourtest.ahk, init_test
and helper_functions are all in the same directory.

>  - on Linux+Wine: how to test-run the new script previously created on Windows

To test it, use:
$ wine /path/to/autohotkey.exe yourtest.ahk

and examine the log in:
$HOME/.wine/drive_c/appinstall/your_test-result.txt

>  - where to upload/send finished test-scripts to

It's in the README on winezeug, but send them to me. If the repository
is moved to winehq, the process may change...

Most of this is covered/explained, but like I said, the problem is no
one reviewed the material, and I wrote Appinstall so I needed little
explanation. If someone would volunteer to help with the documentation
(by proofing it, making sure I didn't leave steps out, etc.), it would
help greatly. E-mail me off list if anyone wants to help with this.

-- 
-Austin



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