test infrastructure ideas appreciated ... - layout tests ...

[Michael Meeks]

On Fri, 2015-06-05 at 14:46 +0200, Thorsten Behrens wrote:
> > So I have never been able to get it stable across more than my
> > machines and gandalf. I suppose you can increase the number of
> > systems that support it if you really know what you are
> > doing.
>
> With the above - pretty much rules it out for me at this stage.

	So - given that we can apply some funding to it - I'm fairly certain
that we can't test layout without fixing this problem, and if we fix it
- then lots of things become possible.

	My suggestion here would be to stub or otherwise clobber the low-level
font API in VCL for this purpose - we used to ship various standard AFMs
- I don't see why we can't have a couple of those - and use their
metrics for every font requested from VCL and just stub the font
rendering for such tests.

	That should / could also be made to work cross-platform too so we'd
capture and find any cross-platform layout issues as well.

	It's not glorious & fun work, but I don't see a good way of testing
precise layout without something like that =) and if TDF can fund it -
all the better.

	ATB,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks at collabora.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot