GitLab

Nautilus is mostly lacking in test, profiling and debug capabilities. This project would be to ensure we have proper tests, a good code coverage and a good framework for debugging and profiling together with our GitLab CI.

Current problems

• We don't know if Nautilus has performance issues.
• We don't know when we break something, we have found 1 year old breaks.
• We don't know where a memory leak is located.

Goals & use cases

• Easily test basic critical functions.
• Prevent regressions between commits and releases.
• Gather data about performance and prevent performance regressions.
• Improve debug of memory leaks.

Requirements

• Have to run in GitLab CI.
• Integrated with Flatpak.
• Available to end users for providing logs.
• Ability to test sections (Search, operations, cache...).

Relevant art

• Gcov
• Perf

Intern requirements

• Good knowledge of C
• Basic knowledge of gcov
• Basic knowledge of perf
• Basic knowledge of glib testing framework
• Other profiling and testing tools knowledge is a plus.

Proposal & plan

Testing

Most probably with glib testing framework, but further exploration of other tools will be necessary. There are tests already present in the test folder.

• Make unit tests and integration tests of most critical functions of the most critical components

  • Search

  • Operations

    Time estimate: 1.5 months

• Possible stretch goals:

  • NautilusFile & NautilusDirectory
  • Cache of files in NautilusFile and NautilusDirectory (To be decided if we can do this one)
  • NautilusFile utilities
  • The ones written above
  • Loading of files in views
  • Network connections
  • gnome-shell search functionality

• Both unit tests and integration tests should display basic profiling (read more in the next section).

• Testing should be split between those that doesn't require gtk and those who do, trying to avoid gtk+ most of the times.

• Set up properly a coverity tool for unit tests, for example 'gcov'. Further exploration on what tools we can use should be done.

  Time estimate: 1 week  

Total time estimate: 7 weeks

Profiling

• Make profile tests for most critical components
  • Basic operations like move, copy/paste, etc. Basically most in nautilus-operations file
  • Search
  • Loading of local directories
  • Loading of network directories
• Test should be able to be easily plugable with an external profile tool like 'perf'

Total time estimate: 2 weeks

Debug

• Explore what options are there for memory leaks, apart of 'valgrind'
• Have proper debug messages in the most critical components
• Include reference count in debug messages. See the Gtk Inspector statistics tab to have an example.
  Time estimate: 2 weeks
• Update or remove the NAUTILUS_DEBUG framework #1220

Time estimate: 1/2 a week

Total time estimate: 2 and a 1/2 weeks