Add tests

[vixalien]

It would be nice to add tests to this repo to ensure that progress made is not undone. Some tests could be copied over from GJS, and a CI runner can be added that tests for test regressions, and another CI runner can be added for style checks.

[vixalien]

In slight relation to #29, I also talked to ebassi, who's a prolific GObject-Introspection developer about testing. Here's what he said:

The "everything" is not an actual library: it's a set of files that are installed by gobject-introspection, and you're supposed to build into a test library in your own bindings https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gobject-introspection/-/blob/main/tests/meson.build?ref_type=heads#L29-47 The Regress and GIMarshalling API are useful to check that your bindings are correct You also want to ask questions about g-i in the GNOME Introspection channel

I think we should also look into that.

[vixalien]

I am still working on this, and realised we need to build the "everything" library so that we're able to test that everything works.

This means there should be a build of the everything library so that we see that fields, properties, arrays, etc... all work. Not sure about which approach to take, but we will get this.

[vixalien]

Here's how to build the Everything library:

First Install dependencies

• gobject-introspection (for g-ir-scanner & g-ir-compiler)
• gi-docgen

Clone the gobject-introspection library.

git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gobject-introspection.git

Build gobject-introspection

cd gobject-introspection
meson setup build
ninja -C build

Build the "everything" library's GIR and typelib.

cd build/tests
g-ir-scanner everything.c everything.h --namespace Everything --library libeverything-1.0.so --warn-all -L$(pwd) $(pkg-config --cflags gobject-2.0) -I../../tests -o Everything-1.0.gir --nsversion 1.0
g-ir-compiler Everything-1.0.gir -o Everything-1.0.typelib

(optional) generate the documentation for the library

I find reading GIRs, not the most straightforward task, but thankfully we can use gi-docgen to generate an excellent web documentation

First write the following to the everything.toml file.

# SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1-or-later
# Copyright 2024 Angelo Verlain

[library]
name = "Everything"
version = "1.0"
browse_url = "https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gobject-introspection/-/blob/main/tests"
repository_url = "https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gobject-introspection.git"
license = "LGPL-2.1-or-later"
description = "The Everything test library"

dependencies = [
  "GObject-2.0",
]

[dependencies."GObject-2.0"]
name = "GObject"
description = "The base type system library"
docs_url = "https://developer.gnome.org/gobject/stable"

Generate the docs.

gi-docgen generate -C everything.toml ./Everything-1.0.gir

Serve the docs.

python -m http.server -d Everything-1.0

next steps

the next step is to figure out how to use the Everything library for testing. We will probably need to add some environment variables so that gobject-introspection can see the library while it's not installed.

Then, we can test that each method works correctly (basically everything in the src/bindings directory).

We must also set up the Github Action workflow to follow these steps later.

[vixalien]

Just found out we can use GIRepository.prepend_search_path