[Wine] Want to help Wine and prevent regressions in your favorite (downloadable) app?

[Austin English]

Howdy all,

For Google Summer of Code, I worked on a project I called Appinstall,
which is basically an automated test framework for Wine. It works as a
simple shell script, that runs several independent tests of
applications, then parses the log files to make sure no applications
broke, or bugs were fixed. The tests themselves are written using
AutoHotKey (http://www.autohotkey.com).

The neat thing about AutoHotKey is it takes pretty much no programming
skill to write a simple test for your favorite application. So if you
really love Foobar Text Editor, and some past version of Wine made it
crash, you can prevent that from happening again by writing a test for
it. That way, daily, Foobar Text Editor is installed and run, to make
sure it doesn't crash. Of course, if you've got time and/or know of a
corner case that may break easily, AutoHotKey has a ton of functions
that allow you to do things like send keystrokes/mouseclicks/etc. to
make sure those things still work in your app.

If you'd like to give it a try, pick your favorite application (make
sure it has a public download available), read
http:/wiki.winehq.org/Appinstall_Testing, and write a test. Be sure to
read the AutoHotKey documentation at http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/
if you're not familiar with it (it's _REALLY_ easy, most of it reads
like plain English) and to verify the test on Windows first. Don't
worry about writing really complex tests, just a simple test that
installs the application, verifies the install, and making sure it
runs can prevent a lot of bugs (and catch new bugs as well).

If you've got a test ready, please e-mail me directly, and (if it
works) I'll commit it.

Source is at http://winezeug.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/appinstall/

-- 
-Austin