Part of this post is about openQA, openSUSE’s automated tool which tests a number of different scenarios, from installation to the behavior of the different desktop environments, plus testing the freshest code from KDE git. Recently, thanks to KDE team member Fabian Vogt, there has been important progress when testing KDE software.

Testing the Dolphin file manager

Those who use KDE software, either in Plasma or in other desktop environments have at least heard of Dolphin, the powerful file manager part of KDE Applications (by the way, have you checked out the recent beta yet?). A couple of weeks ago, in the #opensuse-kde channel, Fabian mentioned the possibility of writing new openQA tests: although there are many tests already, the desktop ones are all but comprehensive given the many possible scenarios. After some discussion back and forth, the consensus was to test Dolphin as it’s a very commonly used in many everyday tasks.

The second part was thinking up what to test. Again, the idea was to focus on common tasks: navigating and creating folders, creating and removing files, and adding elements to Places (the quick-access bar on the left). The first idea also contemplated testing drag-and-drop, but unfortunately such actions aren’t yet supported by openQA, so they were put in the backlog. With these goals in mind, Fabian created a series of tests. This is what being tested:

• Launching dolphin and creating a folder
• Navigating in the folder and creating a text file via context menu (“Create New…”)
• Test navigation via the breadcrumb
• Adding the newly-added folder via Places and ensuring it shows up in other applications
• Remove the folder and the added place

You can see the latest results of the tests for Krypton on openQA. Of course, this does not apply to only the latest unstable code: it is also working for the main distributions.

What does this mean, in practice? openQA is flexible enough to allow even complex tests with multiple operations in succession, and these tests are very useful in catching bugs early, as it has already happened in the past. That doesn’t mean you should be complacent: keep filing those bugs, either to the distro for packaging issues, or to KDE for issues related to the software.

New Krypton links

A small but welcome addition to the Krypton live images is that now the latest build is automatically symlinked to a fixed name (openSUSE_Krypton.$arch.iso, where $arch is either i686 or x86_64. This allows now to link the images directly whenever required: before this change any direct link would break due to the ISO changing name at every rebuild. Doing the same for Argon is on the horizon, but requires some more work before it will happen.

KDE Applications 18.08 beta enters KDE:Applications

As manual testing is still important, the openSUSE KDE:Applications repository now contains the KDE Applications 18.08 beta. If you’re willing to help test the beta, please download the package and file bugs for issues you encounter. In case you’re just using the repository as an add-on, you might want to hold off updating until the final release is out.

Speaking of final release… there might some slight delays in getting it to the distribution this time: part of the KDE team (Antonio, Fabian) is attending Akademy, while others (yours truly) will be away enjoying their hard-earned (?) vacation. In this case, please exercise patience and keep your pitchforks away. ;)