[Development] Tests, Shadow-Build and Cross-Compilation

[Olivier Goffart]

On Sunday 29 January 2012 21:13:25 Holger Hans Peter Freyther wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I finally got around to play with my personal jenkins[1] setup again,
> specially to learn (and be kind of an example on how a non Tier1 platform
> could ever become one).
> 
> There are some issues and I would like to discuss how these can be solved in
> a way that doesn't look like an ad-hoc solution and that might scale.
> 
> I will mumble about the Problems, the Ad-Hoc solutions and muse about a
> fix...
> 
> 
> 
> Problems:
>   Shadow builds:
> 
> I always liked shadow builds as I could have several Qt configurations but a
> command/shared source directory (e.g. X11, QWS, for i386 and ARM). It is
> quite common for tests to break in shadow builds (the QA page in the wiki
> discourages this as well).

Yes, the wiki recommands not to use shadowbuild because it often do not work.
(I had the problem today again while trying to run qlibrary autotest)

[...]
> 
> Musing:
> So somehow cross-compilation and shadow-builds suffer from the same problem
> that accessing files from the source directory with a relative path. One
> proposal would be to use something like 'QDir::addSearchPath("testdata",
> SRCDIR)'" and have it set to the path of the .pro file, and access
> everything using the prefix. Danimo mentioned that this will fail for
> multimedia that might not use the Qt resource system. So we might want to
> have a method in the testlib to resolve a path like "testdata:foo" to a
> proper path? For cross compiling one could change the testdata prefix with
> a command line option or environment variable?
> 
> The other part/wish would be to always have deployment targets for the
> testcases and generate a run script or such as part of the installation.

There is QFINDTESTDATA and QTest::qFindTestData that have been added recently,  
I think for this reason.  Have you heard of them?