WineHQ

Wine TestBot

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Or for those who like to be buzzword compliant, the Wine Testing Cloud Service. The Wine Testbot is a collection of (thoroughly vetted) virtual machines we have running at WineHQ, and now with an approved account, you too can submit your tests to run on several Windows environments.

Getting Started

If you're interested in using the TestBot service, the first thing you'll want to do is register; you can begin by clicking the "Register" link at the TestBot page. Once your account is approved (you'll be notified via email), you can login.

When logged on, the navigation sidebar will include the option to submit a job, allowing you to upload tests in one of two formats:

  • A Windows '.exe' (possibly cross-compiled on unix)
  • A unified diff patch in the style of git diff (the TestBot will compile it for you)

You can also select which Windows releases (we have both 32 and 64-bit versions) you want to run your tests on.

We trust our developers to use this service appropriately so don't abuse the privilege by trying anything questionable. In addition to automatic safety measures, we have access to all of the images' logs and consoles.

After your job has been submitted, you can check on its status from the TestBot homepage; you can also see more detailed progress info by clicking on the job ID. When the job completes, the results will be published on the TestBot page. Just to be safe, there are some failsafes built into the system; a major one is a 5-minute timeout (the Conformance Tests have a similar policy) so try to design considerate, reasonable tests.

TestBot results are not private and can be seen by anyone visiting the TestBot page.

Even if you don't ever register with the TestBot service, you'll be interacting with it in the form of Marvin. This bot automatically scans all submissions to the wine-patches mailing list for changes to Conformance Tests first. Then it rebuilds the changed tests and runs them on all Windows images to guarantee the changes don't break anything. Marvin should mail back the results of those tests to the submitter, and if it determines there are any new failures (vs. the current version of winetest.exe from WineHQ), it will email both the submitter and the wine-devel mailing list.

Marvin only handles complete series of patches. If you submit a series, Marvin will queue your first patches until it has received the full series, then combine them into a single patch to test all at once.

How It Works

Only patches that contain changes to tests are run so the TestBot checks for changes to files of the form dlls/<dllname>/tests/* . This is intended to cover the vast majority of cases but is not 100% failproof (for example, changes to include files may not trigger the tests depending on that header). Before each test run, the selected VMs are also reset to a clean snapshot to ensure good build hygiene.

For each Windows release, we have a "basic" VM that runs the most up-to-date, popular version of that release. However, we also try to provide VMs that test other variations of your release. For example, the basic XP image uses XP Professional SP3, but we have other images for SP2, Media Center Edition, etc. Of course, we still cannot exhaust every possible configuration of Windows, but these extra datapoints still help immensely.

Because the TestBot is completely virtual, we recommend also running your test (using a custom build of Wine's unit-test suite) on at least one physical Windows machine, even if everything checks out with the TestBot.

Questions

If you have any questions or suggestions for the TestBot maintainers, you can contact them through the web-interface. You can also report issues on the WineHQ Bugzilla; just remember to select Wine-TestBot as the product when you write up your report.

The TestBot source code is licensed as LGPL and is available from the tools repository of WineHQ's git tree. You can browse the source online or clone it to your system with git:

git clone git://source.winehq.org/git/tools.git

Some History

We have Ge van Geldorp (peace be upon him) to thank for laying the groundwork of the TestBot service. After several discussions about testing at WineConf 2009, he took it upon himself to setup and manage the first servers and their VMs, not to mention writing the web-interface and Marvin, our friendly patch-checking bot. Even the first edition of this page was his work.

After his passing, the service was migrated to new machines at CodeWeavers, and since then, we have been updating the VMs to provide modern Windows environments and doing further testing to ensure the TestBot results are valid.

See also

This page was last edited on 2 March 2016, at 01:01.