In a framework like kivy, or any app using it it can happen that there is a bug that precise interaction is needed to reproduce, and it can be frustrating to manually test every time, sometime a complex or repetitive manipulation.
Kivy has a not-so-well known module, called recorder that allows to record and
replay user inputs, both touch and keyboard events.
python main.py -m recorder
f8 to record, f7 to replay, ‘simple as that!
It’s helpful, but in some cases, something is missing, for example, an user reported a memory leak in 1.7.2, apparently windows specific, that happened to crash the app (the touchracer demo) after a lot of touches, over a very long time (hours) of usage. You don’t want to record hours of touches just to replay them, at least, i didn’t want to.
So i did a little update to this module, to add the feature of playing the same replay times and time over, i recorded a sample of one touch (the touch duration didn’t matter), as i wasn’t very fast (i’m only human), this recording lasted nearly a second (starting to record, touch down, touch up, stoping record), so i fired my editor of choice, and edited the recorder.kvi to:
#RECORDER1.0
(.0118309783935547, 'begin', 1, {'is_touch': True, 'profile': ['pos'], 'sy': 0.9688715953307393, 'sx': 0.08692628650904033})
(.0642069625854492, 'end', 1, {'is_touch': True, 'profile': ['pos'], 'sy': 0.9688715953307393, 'sx': 0.08692628650904033})
Note that the times are now quite low, so this recording will be played dozens of time a second, and i removed over events, such as the keyboard ones.
With this, it was a lot easier to observe the leak on 1.7.2, memory was raising fast enough to observe.
Now, i knew we had a few memory leak fixes in master, so to check we had gotten
ride of this one, i just had to replay this very same test on the last version.
And if needed, git-bisect will tell me which one did fix it, without too much
effort on my side.
And it was indeed fixed!