Tests Active

Looking back over this blog, I see that it was around a year ago that I got the initial WinCairo buildbot running. I'm very pleased to announce that I have gotten ahold of a much more powerful machine, and am now able to run a full build and tests in slightly under an hour -- a huge improvement over the old hardware which took over two hours just to build the software! In fact, the image on the left shows the new build box, but unfortunately the flash on my iPhone wiped out the machine's label ("Webkit") on the rack faceplate.

This is a big step, because we can now track regressions and gauge correctness compared to the other platforms. Up to now, testing has largely consisted of periodic manual runs of the test suite, and a separate set of high-level tests run as part of a larger application. This was not ideal, because it was easy for low-level functions in WebKit that I rarely use to be broken and missed.

All is not perfect, of course. Although over 12,000 tests now run (successfully) with each build, that is effectively two thirds of the full test suite. Most of the tests I have disabled are due to small differences in the output layout. I'm trying to understand why these differences exist, but I suspect many of them simply reflect small differences in Cairo compared to the CoreGraphics rendering layer.

If any of you lurkers are interested in helping out, trying out some of the tests I have disabled and figuring out why they fail would be a huge help!