KDE runs a whole bunch of Continuous Integration (CI) builders. These try to build KDE software from version control all the time, and are triggered by commits from developers. We might quibble over the name “CI”, but at least we know most of the time that the code compiles and the tests run and pass. Here’s the KDE FreeBSD overview page.

Jenkins Status
Jenkins Status

I’ve probably complained about Jenkins status indicators before. I never know how the status indicators – colored balls and cloudy skies – are supposed to steer me towards relevant issues. Red balls are bad, that’s all I’ve got for sure.

Recently David Faure has been working on getting all the FreeBSD tests for frameworks to pass – so we get blue balls, I guess. This is a consummation devoutly to be wish’d, so I’ve been poking at those tests as well. Since I do not usually poke much at KDE Frameworks, this is an education for me as well.

Not that the tests are as straightforward as one might wish: on the CI, there are four plasma-framework test-failures as of today, while locally I get three failures, only one of which is also a failure on CI. And the one shared failure has entirely different specific failed test-cases. That makes it doubly difficult to track down what the actual problem is (or how much the test depends on the specific desktop setup of the developer who wrote it).

At least one test got a small fix from me, because it fails when the (or a .. who says you can have only one?) Plasma panel is on the left-hand edge of the screen.

So there’s slow-but-steady progress. Some day we’ll be all sunny and blue (which is different from being fuzzy and blue – a good song, look it up).