Re: Fox toolkit future?

Hi Enno & all,

>On 24-Jun-23 21:14, Ulrich Teichert wrote:
>> Using GitLab/GitHub CI for a GUI toolkit is...nice, but will not give
>> you much more than "it compiles" and perhaps running some unit tests.
>> It will not tell you *how* it looks, if the neat algorithm which compiles
>> alright will display all the components as you would like to on all platforms.
>> It may be an improvement, but IMHO not in the crucial points.

>Getting "it compiles on all supported platforms, not just on yours" is 
>extremely valuable feedback, a lot better than having none at all.

Yes, been there, done that (actually, I've done it twice already working for
two different companies...). But by default GitHub will only get you feedback
about Ubuntu on AMD64, Windows on AMD64 and MacOS (dunno if they made the step
to AARCH64 already...). For any other platform you have to provide the runners
24/7. Now that I think of, this could be probably best done with latent runners
on buildbot (think of starting a VM on demand on QEMU for all the supported
platforms). But anyway, it would be a lot more effort than just writing a few
lines of yaml. Just starting with the default set and adding the other
platforms later will get you going, sure, but if just stops with the default
set of platforms the gain will not be much, IMHO.

>And the ability to run unit tests during CI is usually the first step 
>towards someone making the effort to writing them. Regarding your 
>concern about visual testing: It's possible to write tests that render 
>to a virtual framebuffer (like xvfb) and do screenshot comparisons. A 
>lot of browser testing works like that.

Yes, I've written selenium tests in the past. While this may work for a time
these tests are likely to break with the smallest possible changes and
are high maintenance infrastructure. Personally, I would not like to
maintain them. Would you? Perhaps it would be better to start writing
self tests (not necessarily unit tests, depending on how strict you do
the categorization...) inside the framework and see how far that could be
driven to.

>> In my opinon, using GNU autotools is the most portable way. cmake is such a
>> pain to use on systems which are not exactly mainstream, not to speak of
>> systems to where it's not ported yet or using a compiler which it knows
>> nothing about.

>Are these systems really actively supported? When was the last time 
>somebody compiled Fox on Sequent DYNIX or an Itanium system? Are those 
>users likely to upgrade from 1.6 to a new stable?

Well, I don't know. It's hard enough to guess how many active users of FOX
are out there, it's even harder to guess on what platform...

CU,
Uli

Ulrich Teichert
Stormweg 24
24539 Neumünster, Germany



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