In lieu of #50, which was never finished, it would be useful to provide utilities to test and preview changes without modifying your real configuration. This makes things easier when testing a different desktop environment, or something like a login screen which requires logging out to see what changed.
The following are some ideas I've had and a rough order in which to attempt them. Any suggestions are welcome.
NixOS configurations as virtual machines for manual testing. Each configuration should run either:
A desktop environment with only its default applications
An application in a minimal environment such as cage
Build the above on GitHub Actions.
This won't test that the theme appears or looks good, but it should pick up on more build errors than the current CI does.
Use the NixOS testing framework or another method to automatically screenshot each virtual machine.
Benefits could include:
Before and after screenshots generated by GitHub Actions
Mass producing showcases for the documentation
I don't think this one is worth implementing right now, because:
Many targets will require specific code to detect when they are ready for a screenshot
Creating a system to generate relevant screenshots and post them to GitHub would be a significant amount of work
Without such a system, the screenshots would have to be built locally, in which case you can just use the virtual machine interactively
Specially crafted color schemes to make edge cases more noticeable.
For example, a scheme with certain colors equal to each other would highlight cases where we expect two colors to contrast, but the specification doesn't require them to be that way.
Similarly, a scheme with vastly different colors would catch cases where two similar colors were mistaken as being the same.
In lieu of #50, which was never finished, it would be useful to provide utilities to test and preview changes without modifying your real configuration. This makes things easier when testing a different desktop environment, or something like a login screen which requires logging out to see what changed.
The following are some ideas I've had and a rough order in which to attempt them. Any suggestions are welcome.
NixOS configurations as virtual machines for manual testing. Each configuration should run either:
cageBuild the above on GitHub Actions.
This won't test that the theme appears or looks good, but it should pick up on more build errors than the current CI does.
Use the NixOS testing framework or another method to automatically screenshot each virtual machine.
Benefits could include:
I don't think this one is worth implementing right now, because:
Specially crafted color schemes to make edge cases more noticeable.
For example, a scheme with certain colors equal to each other would highlight cases where we expect two colors to contrast, but the specification doesn't require them to be that way.
Similarly, a scheme with vastly different colors would catch cases where two similar colors were mistaken as being the same.
Current tasks: