wlcs aspires to be a protocol-conformance-verifying test suite usable by
Wayland compositor implementors.
It is growing out of porting the existing Weston test suite to be run
in Mir's <https://github.com/MirServer/mir>_ test suite,
but it is designed to be usable by any compositor.
There have been a number of previous attempts at a Wayland compositor test
suite - the Wayland Functional Integration Test Suite <https://github.com/intel/wayland-fits>_,
and the Weston test suite <https://wayland.freedesktop.org/testing.html#heading_toc_j_3>_
are a couple of examples.
What sets wlcs apart from the graveyard of existing test suites is its
integration method.
Previous test suites have used a Wayland protocol extension to interrogate the compositor state. This obviously requires that compositors implement that protocol, means that tests only have access to information provided by that protocol, and the IPC means that there isn't a canonical happens-before ordering available.
Instead, wlcs relies on compositors providing an integration module,
providing wlcs with API hooks to start a compositor, connect a client,
move a window, and so on. This makes both writing and debugging tests easier -
the tests are (generally) in the same address space as the compositor, so there
is a consistent global clock available, it's easier to poke around in
compositor internals, and standard debugging tools can follow control flow from
the test client to the compositor and back again.
In order for wlcs to test your compositor you need to provide an
integration module. This needs to implement the interfaces found in
include/wlcs. If your integration module is
awesome_compositor_wlcs_integration.so, then running wlcs awesome_compositor_wlcs_integration.so will load and run all the tests.
wlcs requires a small number of hooks into your compositor to drive the
tests - it needs to know how to start and stop the mainloop, to get an fd to
connect a client to, and so on.
To access these hooks, wlcs looks for a symbol wlcs_server_integration
of type struct WlcsServerIntegration const (defined in
include/wlcs/display_server.h) in your integration module.