Sunday, May 21, 2017

shell to cybook

I got the z-list issue fixed. The error was what I suspected, but what is more interesting is that I have been able to write a test case that reproduced the bug systematically, and thus that demonstrate that the problem is gone with the fix.

I had to change my approach for investigating that because I've been doing so much on-line activities these last days that my eyes started to "panic". So rather than staring at my laptop top understand the outcome of a test, I pushed it into a .html file that I could browse with my e-ink cybook. 


python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000 & # http.server if you're on python3

(echo "<html><body><pre>" ; 
  ./testme ; 
  echo "</pre></body></html>") > /tmp/html/out.html

(echo "<html><body><pre>" ; 
  grep -h -C14 prepare libgeds/source/* 
    | sed -e 's:&:&amp;:g;' 
    | sed -e "s:<:\&lt;:g;" 
    | sed -e 's:>:\&gt;:g;' ; 
  echo "</pre></body></html>") > /tmp/html/code.html

Bon, ça n'a pas été une semaine simple, mais j'ai réussi à pouvoir prouver que le bug d'affichage de Bilou est corrigé tout en reposant suffisamment mes yeux qui criaient "au secours" la semaine d'avant. J'ai notamment utilisé assez abondamment ma liseuse pour passer en revue les résultats des tests (puisque oui, j'ai choisi l'approche "test automatique plutôt que l'approche "debugging interactif raffiné", la faute aux yeux précédemment cités). Celà dit, je vais rester prudent et laisser les détails techniques uniquement en Anglais pour cette fois-ci. Dès que j'aurai compris pourquoi l'encre refuse de s'arrêter à la hauteur demandée, je pourrai faire une release améliorée de School Rush.

The test itself is actually fairly simple conceptually: I just drag Bilou around in the level, back and forth, emulating the camera and the game logic after each displacement. As the camera moves through the level, some game objects freeze and unfreeze, recycling the hardware sprites, and inkjets use the top-layer sprites so that ink drops look to come from within it.

On the first round, the bug did not happen, but I had programmed a "trap" to report what I thought to be the precondition to reproduce the bug (having the inkjet frozen while it had one hardware sprite at top priority). The test then showed me that this happened, but less often that I thought. Actually, it only happened with one inkjet near the end of the level.

Then, I extended the test so that I would make an increased number of scrolls through the level. There I got the bug appearing systematically on one of the levels. I had to filter out some of the events reported during the scroll (I reported every change in the zlist's size as well as any arrival/departure of hardware sprites): inkjets throwing ink corresponding for instance to 4 correlated events. Making sure that the camera coordinates are reported (instead of Bilou's coordinate) helped as well.

Tags: , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)