2.8 KiB
Testing and debugging Plasma 5 plasmoid with Qt Creator
The following instructions allow to test the Plasmoid by installing it in a test directory rather than the regular home to separate testing from production.
- Build as usual, ensure
NO_PLASMOID
is turned off - Add build step to execute custom target
init_plasmoid_testing
which will install the Plasmoid in a test directory which is "$BUILD_DIR/plasmoid/testdir" by default - Add new config for run in Qt Creator and set
plasmoidviewer
(orplasmawindowed
) as executable - In execution environment, set
QT_PLUGIN_PATH
to$BUILD_DIR/plasmoid/lib
which should be containing the plugin for the Plasmoid underplasma/applets/libsyncthingplasmoid.so
QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS
to 1 for verbose plugin detectionHOME
to the test directory from step 2 so plasmoidviewer finds the Plasmoid in the test directory
- Set
--applet martchus.syncthingplasmoid
as CLI argument - Ignore warning that executable is no debug build, it is sufficiant when the plugin is a debug build (see next section for QML debugging)
Saving/restoring settings
Be aware that plasmoidviewer
will revert Plasmoid-specific settings to the defaults on
startup. So it is not possible to test restoring/saving settings using it.
For this use case, plasmawindowed
can be used instead.
Testing within the real Plasma shell
Some issues are only reproducible within the actual Plasma shell. It is possible to test
with the real Plasma shell in the same way as described above by setting plasmashell
as
executable.
It is only possible to run one plasmashell
at a time so you have to stop your regular
plasmashell
first. While developing you can start e.g. tint2
to be not without a shell.
It works quite well within a Plasma session when both shells are placed on different screen
edges.
Enable QML debugging
To enable QML debugging, it is required to rebuild plasmoidviewer
with QML debugging
enabled.
For Arch Linux, I created the package
plasmoidviewer-debug
for that purpose. Installing this package and using plasmoidviewer-debug
instead of plasmoidviewer
should make enabling QML debugging in the Run section of Qt Creator work.
To create a debug build of plasmoidviewer
manually:
- Get plasma-sdk:
git clone https://anongit.kde.org/plasma-sdk.git
- Create a debug build of
plasmoidviewer
and ensureQT_QML_DEBUG
is defined when compilingplasmoidviewer
, eg. by applying [PATCH] Enable QML debugging. - Prepend the build directory containing the
plasmoidviewer
binary to the path variable in the build environment of Syncthing Tray. - Enable QML debugging in the Run section.