[ANN] piglit v1 - automated OpenGL tests

[Nicolai Hähnle]

This is to announce the release of piglit v1.

The authoritative version of this release is designated by a corresponding tag 
in the respository on freedesktop.org. You can download a tarball directly 
from:

    http://cgit.freedesktop.org/piglit/snapshot/piglit-v1.tar.gz


1) What is piglit?

piglit is an automated test framework for OpenGL, intended to make driver 
developers' lives easier by accessible and automatic regression testing. It 
incorporates Glean, many (but far too few) of the tests that come with Mesa, 
and a growing number of test cases that accumulated specifically during driver 
development.

It is available from Git, and the git web interface is about as close to an 
official website as it gets:

    http://cgit.freedesktop.org/piglit

I also have a page on my fd.o website, which I mostly use to hold the test 
results of my semi-regular regression tests (of the radeon drivers):

    http://people.freedesktop.org/~nh/piglit/


2) Why the release?

Many people, especially driver developers, will want to simply use piglit from 
git. It should be easy to set up, and being a test suite with a slow rate of 
change, there shouldn't be any problems associated with just using that.

However, it has been pointed out to me that for distributions who want to 
organize tests among their testers, it would be useful to have some explicit 
release to point to. This is my attempt to help them with that, since I 
believe we can only win by getting more help with testing on a diverse range 
of hardware.

It may be that we can improve this process -- I just looked for the most 
lightweight thing I could think of. If so, I'd like to hear about it, and 
we'll just do that.

Otherwise, I simply intend to tag a new version with linearly increasing 
version numbers once in a while.


3) Other resources?

To understand the history of piglit, this document might help:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/piglit/tree/HACKING

Apart from that, there really aren't any additional resources, to my 
knowledge. There is no additional website, there is no mailing list -- I'm 
posting to mesa3d-devel, because that's where I believe most people who can 
benefit from piglit are, and to the xorg list because there may be people 
there interested in Xorg-related testing in general who could also benefit 
from piglit.

I feel that the volume on piglit development is too low to warrant its own 
mailing list.

I also feel that having a website just for the website's sake only sucks 
resources, and carries the danger of the website going stale etc. At least the 
first real search result of Google for 'piglit' is my personal website for it 
(after you ignore the typo advice), which points to the Git repository and 
webgit interface. That just seems good enough to me.

Finally, I would like to hear from people if they have more automated tests 
that could be incorporated into piglit, so that we can continually improve the 
state of open source OpenGL driver testing.

Cheers,
Nicolai Hähnle