4 Mar 2006 (Sat)

00:36:07 # Life soundtracker on 770? I received an inquiry if soundtracker will work on Nokia 770. Looking at the specs, it doesn't sound like it's impossible, might have performance issues related to FPU. I am not quite sure if it will run fast enough (as in being able to play-back MOD files real-time) with a floating-point emulation, and not sure if it has a FPU. Even if it had a FPU I'm not quite sure Debian package will have FPU support. Nice project to experiment, though.

21:56:44 # Life libpkg-guide in PDF format? I received a mail asking if libpkg-guide is in PDF format. I checked, and saw that it's not available, but I have a reference to a PDF file in the Makefile. The hooks are there, but it was just not published. I built the PDF, and looked at it, and looked away after several seconds. It was ugly. All the tables were broken. It's built through dxml-db2latex, but that's not actually a very good docbook-to-latex translator. I wonder if there is a good docbook-to-PDF translator? debacle told me 'db2latex' is usable, I tried; and it indeed does look much more beautiful. Thanks for those who had helped, I managed to get libpkg-guide into PDF, although it was locally getting too late at night... Phew. Things sometimes move too fast for me.

23:12:11 # Life autopkgtest and pbuilder. While I was reviewing Debian Weekly News translations, I noticed there was autopkgtest. Nice to see something that emerging to be available. I've already written quite a few tests for pbuilder testsuite, so it's unwelcome in terms of having a incompatible test interface. Browsing autopkgtest, it's non-obvious how to write the tests, or how to use it, so some documentation is probably required. pbuilder testsuite has been deployed on quite a few of my packages, so I have some insights. It's pbuilder, so it's slow, but if it's included in the automated workflow (kick off build -- automatically-test -- upload), it's not too bad. The basic tests that can be done are console based tests like running ldd, and giving it some input to get some output. The tests are in source-code debian/pbuilder-test/, and are just shell scripts run through run-parts. The following is a rough list of things that I've done:

• LADSPA plugins (.so files): run analyseplugin to see that it can be detected: see mcp-plugins
• library package: create and build and run a test program from source-code and see that it does compile and run: see ecasound package, dancer-xml, dlisp, libdshconfig
• emacs lisp: run the lisp code non-interactively using -eval, and grep for output, see yc-el.

I've not yet done much GUI testing, since I am yet to find a usable GUI automatic testing tool.