Vishesh Handa's personal website

Nepomuk Test Framework


Back in October 2010, I was trying to write automated tests for Nepomuk Backup. That turned out to be a huge disaster, but the test suite was still had some pretty good stuff in it.

Most of it was based on George Goldberg’s Telepathy Test Lib.

Over the last month, I’ve finally moved it to git, cleaned it up and started using it for real tests.

Why do we need a testing framework?

The Nepomuk Architecture is extremely decentralized. We have one central storage service which handles virtuoso, and other different services for monitoring files, indexing them, performing queries and so on.

These services or plugins often require other services to be running and form a dependency chain. In order to properly test any them, we need the dependencies to be satisfied. That’s where it starts to get messy. Specially cause Nepomuk primarily uses local sockets and DBus to communicate.

Right now we have a lot of tests that test individual classes from the services, but nothing that tested if files are actually getting reindexed after they are modified. Such things were always tested manually.

Now, with this testing framework, we can launch a separate KDE and DBus session and run tests.

Another reason why we really need this is that from KDE 4.8.1 Nepomuk::Resource also uses DBus in order to write back any of its changes. That effectively kills all of its current unit tests.

And we need unit tests!

Source Code

The code is still in my scratch repo, and there are very few tests, but we’re getting there. It has already helped me replicate a nasty PIM Feeder bug, so Yaye! :)