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testing.md

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Testing and debugging Plasmoid for Plasma with Qt Creator

The following instructions allow to test the Plasmoid by installing it in a test directory rather than the regular home to separate testing from production.

  1. Build as usual, ensure NO_PLASMOID is turned off.
  2. Add a build step to execute the custom target init_plasmoid_testing which will install the Plasmoid in a test directory which is $CMAKE_BUILD_DIR/plasmoid-testing by default (configurable via cache variable PLASMOID_TESTDIR, the sub directory plasmoid-testing is not part of the variable).
  3. Add new config for "run" in Qt Creator and set bash as executable.
  4. Set %{sourceDir}/../../syncthingtray/plasmoid/scripts/starttesting.sh plasmoidviewer --applet martchus.syncthingplasmoid as CLI argument.
    • It is also possible to use plasmawindowed or plasmashell, see sections below.
    • It is also possible to specify org.kde.plasma.systemtray as applet to test how the Plasmoid looks like within the system tray plasmoid.
    • This usage of %{sourceDir} assumes one used the "Building this straight" instructions from the main README.md.
    • When using a suffix (e.g. development build via CMake presets), this suffix needs to be appended to the applet name.
  5. Keep %{buildDir} as working directory.
  6. In the execution environment there's nothing mandatory to be set because starttesting.sh should already take care of setting the environment.
    • The home directory is set in accordance with the directory used in step 2. but can be overridden by setting TEST_HOME; make sure that TEST_HOME and the CMake variable PLASMOID_TESTDIR are set in accordance.
    • If not already set, QT_PLUGIN_PATH is set to $CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR/plasmoid/lib which should contain the plugin for the Plasmoid under plasma/applets/*syncthingplasmoid*.so.
    • Set QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS to 1 for verbose plugin detection (the verbose output might be suppressed when starting via Qt Creator so it may be worthwhile to start this from a terminal).
  7. Ignore warning that executable is no debug build, it is sufficient when the plugin is a debug build (see next section for QML debugging).

Saving/restoring settings

Be aware that plasmoidviewer will revert Plasmoid-specific settings to the defaults on startup. So it is not possible to test restoring/saving settings using it. For this use case, plasmawindowed can be used instead.

Testing within the real Plasma shell

Some issues are only reproducible within the actual Plasma shell. It is possible to test with the real Plasma shell in the same way as described above by setting plasmashell as executable.

It is only possible to run one plasmashell at a time so you have to stop your regular plasmashell first. While developing you can start e.g. tint2 to be not without a shell. It works quite well within a Plasma session when both shells are placed on different screen edges.

Enable QML debugging

It is not clear whether the following instructions are still valid for Plasma 6. It seems that QML debugging can be enabled under Plasma 6 by setting the environment variable PLASMA_ENABLE_QML_DEBUG but this has not been tested yet.

To enable QML debugging, it is required to rebuild plasmoidviewer with QML debugging enabled.

For Arch Linux, I created the package plasmoidviewer-debug for that purpose. Installing this package and using plasmoidviewer-debug instead of plasmoidviewer should make enabling QML debugging in the Run section of Qt Creator work.

To create a debug build of plasmoidviewer manually:

  1. Get plasma-sdk: git clone https://anongit.kde.org/plasma-sdk.git
  2. Create a debug build of plasmoidviewer and ensure QT_QML_DEBUG is defined when compiling plasmoidviewer, e.g. by applying [PATCH] Enable QML debugging.
  3. Prepend the build directory containing the plasmoidviewer binary to the path variable in the build environment of Syncthing Tray.
  4. Enable QML debugging in the Run section.

Testing against a development build of Plasma

  1. Build the whole dependency chain up to plasma-desktop installing it under some custom prefix. Note that plasma-sdk alone is not sufficient.
  2. Then follow the usual steps but make sure you build Syncthing Tray against the custom KDE builds. This is achieved the easiest by using the ``debug-kde-customCMake preset. This preset uses the environment variableKDE_INSTALL_DIR` which must point to the custom prefix used in step 1.
  3. Source the prefix.sh script that should be present in the build directory of any KDE library you built in step 1, e.g. source kde/plasma-sdk/prefix.sh.
  4. When setting the environment one needs to be more careful to not override variables set in step 3. It is the easiest to just start e.g. plasmawindowed from the shell: 
    QT_PLUGIN_PATH=$BUILD_DIR/syncthingtray/`debug-kde-custom/syncthingtray/plasmoid/lib:$QT_PLUGIN_PATH HOME=$BUILD_DIR/syncthingtray/`debug-kde-custom/plasmoid-testing kdeinstall/bin/plasmawindowed martchus.syncthingplasmoid-devel
    • It would make sense to tweak starttesting.sh to be able to do the sourcing automatically.