Toxic Elephant

How I found a bug in GirFFI using Travis and Git

Posted by matijs 17/02/2013 at 20h15

I love Travis CI. I love git bisect. I used both recently to track down a bug in GirFFI.

Suddenly, builds were failing on JRuby. The problem did not occur on my own, 64 bit, machine, so it seemed hard to debug. I tried making Travis use different JVMs, but that didn’t help, apart from crashing in a different way (faster, too, which was nice).

Building a Travis box

Using the travis-boxes repository, I created a VM as used by Travis. This is currently not documented well in the READMEs, so I’m writing it down here, slightly out of order of actual events.

I cloned the following three repositories:

travis-cookbooks travis-boxes veewee-definitions

First, I created a base box in veewee-definitions, according to its README. In this case, I created a precise32 box, since that’s the box Travis uses for the builds. The final, export, stage creates a precise32.box file.

Then, I moved the precise32.box file to travis-boxes/boxes, making a base box available there. There is a Thor task to create just such a base box right there, but it doesn’t work, and seems to be deprecated anyway, since veewee is no longer supposed to be used in that repository.

So, a base box being available in travis-boxes, I used the following to create a fully functional box for testing Rubies:

bundle exec thor travis:box:build -b precise32 ruby

Oddly, this didn’t produce a box travis-ruby, but it did produce travis-development, which I could then manipulate using vagrant.

Hunting down the bug

I ssh’d into my fresh travis box using vagrant ssh. After a couple of minutes getting to know rvm (I use rbenv myself), I was able to confirm the crash on JRuby. After some initial poking around trying to pin down the problem to one particular test case and failing, I decided to use git bisect. As my check I used the test:introspection task, which reliably crashed when the problem was present.

While it’s possible to automate git bisect, I like to use it manually, since a particular test used may fail for unrelated reasons. Also, since git bisect is a really fast process, there is a pleasent lack of tedium.

Anyway, after a couple of iterations, I was able to locate the problematic commit. By checking the different bits of the commit I then found the culprit: I accidentally broke the code that creates layout definitions, in particular the one used by GValue. Going back to master, I added a simple test and fix. I will have to revisit the code later to clean it up and make it more robust.

Tags GirFFI, git, github, software, travis no comments no trackbacks

Building a Simple Markdown Viewer with GirFFI

Posted by matijs 17/04/2012 at 07h41

This morning, I found myself looking for a simple markdown previewer that would run on the desktop. Using GirFFI, it was ridiculously easy to create it myself.

The simple version, based on the Webkit example in the GirFFI repository, goes something like this:

require 'ffi-gtk3'
require 'github/markup'
GirFFI.setup :WebKit, ’3.0’
Gtk.init
win = Gtk::Window.new :toplevel
scr = Gtk::ScrolledWindow.new nil, nil
wv = WebKit::WebView.new
win.add scr
scr.add wv
win.set_default_geometry 700, 500
win.show_all
file = ARGV[0]
fullpath = File.expand_path(file, Dir.pwd)
html = GitHub::Markup.render fullpath
wv.load_string html, nil, nil, "file://#{fullpath}"
GObject.signal_connect(win, "destroy") { Gtk.main_quit }
Gtk.main

I got the basic version working in about 10 minutes. The more complex version adds a keyboard handler to allow reloading the viewed file.

Tags GirFFI, software 2 comments no trackbacks