On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, Austin English wrote: [...]
Using a program like AutoHotkey to install a program and test its features would be a better route IMHO.
I agree but I'm not sure AutoHotKey is quite ready yet. But I think that getting a robust graphical testing environment would be hugely beneficial for Wine.
There are a couple of options to get there: * cxtest http://www.cxtest.org/ It has tools to record and replay clicks. One big drawback is that in its current form it is very Unixy, that is you need bash and VNC in order to record an application installation. This prevents running it on Windows which is really needed imho. On the other hand it can handle both Unix and Windows scripting. It is also missing support for some things like menus and combo boxes. However it has a great backend for automating and reporting the tests, identifying known issues and automatically grouping them together, etc.
* AutoHotKey http://www.autohotkey.com/ It runs on Windows and has a very nice 'record' feature: you can start it in record mode, install your application, stop the recording and presto, you have a script ready to replay. However it generates scripts that are coordinates based (i.e. left-click at 123x456), rather than 'controls' based (i.e. left-click on the 'Ok' button in the 'Step 3 windows'). That worries me as I'm not convinced these coordinates will match well when the application is run in Wine (potential font issues). I suspect that even on Windows there could be issues if the user changes the font size, DPI or stuff like that. However I don't know how commercial graphical regression testing tools handle that so maybe it's not such a big issue. Also AutoHotKey has not yet been integrated in a framework with a good backend.
So one thing that would be very good for Wine would be to improve AutoHotKey so it really does all that we need. It should be good enough that open-source projects would want to use it for their own regression testing on Windows, so that we would just reuse their scripts. However I don't know if it's suitable for a GSoC project. Also it may be more of an AutoHotKey GSoC than a Wine one.