The current testing workflow had quite a few major flaws and it was no
longer possible after the move of Any* plugins to core. Among the flaws
is:
* Every plugin was basically built twice, once as the real plugin and
once as a static testing library. Most of the build shared common
object files, but nevertheless it inflated build times and made the
buildsystem extremely complex.
* Because the actual plugin binary was never actually loaded during the
test, it couldn't spot problems like:
- undefined references
- errors in metadata files
- mismatched plugin interface/version, missing entry points
- broken static plugin import files
* Tests that made use of independent plugins (such as TgaImageConverter
test using TgaImporter to verify the output) had a hardcoded
dependency on such plugins, making a minimal setup very hard.
* Dynamic loading of plugins from the Any* proxies was always directed
to the install location on the filesystem with no possibility to
load these directly from the build tree. That caused random ABI
mismatch crashes, or, on the other hand, if no plugins were
installed, particular portions of the codebase weren't tested at all.
Now the workflow is the following:
* Every plugin is built exactly once, either as dynamic or as static.
* The test always loads it via the plugin manager. If it's dynamic,
it's loaded straight from the build directory; if it's static, it
gets linked to the test executable directly.
* Plugins used indirectly are always served from the build directory
(if enabled) to ensure reproducibility and independence on what's
installed on the filesystem. Missing presence of these plugins causes
particular tests to be simply skipped.
* Plugins that have extensive tests for internal functionality that's
not exposed through the plugin interface are still built in two
parts, but the internal tests are simply consuming the OBJECT files
directly instead of linking to a static library.
Vladimír Vondruš
84af73a582