[Buildbot-devel] Running GUI tests on an OS X buildslave

[C. E. Ball]

> Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:08:05 -0700
> From: john gale <john at smadness.com>
> Subject: Re: [Buildbot-devel] Has anyone looked at changing buildbot
>        to use  ssh to connect to the slaves?
...
> To some degree it does seem a bit more intuitive to use ssh, but
> running the buildbot slave process under the GUI is a powerful way to
> run tests.  Say, on Mac OS X, you can't ssh into a machine and easily
> connect to the GUI security session to run tests on a GUI process.
> It's easier to set up a launchd plist on the slave, run in the GUI
> session, which then requests tests to run from the master.

Sorry to hijack this discussion, but I wonder if someone who has
experience of running a buildslave on OS X could give some advice? The
paragraph above hints to me that the author knows what he is doing,
but I don't understand what is being described!

I have a set of tests that need to launch GUI windows. On linux, I use
xvfb-run to provide an X display for the tests. On OS X, things seem
to be a little more complicated. The software I'm building uses Python
and Tkinter, so it can be built for X11 and for the native mac display
(Aqua?). Using X11, I could do the same as for linux and use Xvfb (if
I could find a binary for OS X 10.5). But using Aqua, how can I give
the buildslave access to a graphical display without requiring the
buildbot user to be logged in graphically to OS X? How do other people
cope with this problem? I am inexperienced with OS X, so I wonder if I
have missed an obvious solution. The machine is shared, although I do
have sudo rights on it.

Thanks very much for any tips.

Chris
http://buildbot.topographica.org/