ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

People have generally felt a little bit restricted with our application
lifecycle/containment and wanted to "just run it" more than once. While
I will continuously fight back on that as part of the shipping system, I
thought it might be fun to make something that would allow for that. So
I made a small toy I called ubuntu-app-test.

NOTE: This shouldn't be considered a replacement for things like the gdb
support in QtCreator. If you can use that it's done infinitely better,
this is a hack, a toy, please don't rely on it.

What this does it that it installs two things, a small utility and an
application called ubuntu-app-test. The small utility launches the
application, then creates a trusted prompt session over it, and launches
another utility in that trusted prompt session. The general effect is
that you can do this:

  $ ubuntu-app-test webbrowser-app

And you will have started the browser in your shell with stdout and your
command line arguments or what ever else you want.

Perhaps you have always thought "wow, this webbrowser is too fast!" you
can do this to fix it:

  $ ubuntu-app-test valgrind webbrowser-app

NOTE: I actually ran out of RAM with this before the browser started :-)

To build it you can do this on a phone in developer mode with a writable
image:

  $ sudo apt-get install cmake libmirclient-dev
libubuntu-app-launch2-dev debhelper build-essential bzr-builddeb
  $ bzr co --lightweight lp:~ted/+junk/ubuntu-app-test
  $ cd ubuntu-app-test
  $ bzr bd
  $ dpkg -i ../build-area/ubuntu-app-test_0.1-0ubuntu1~ppa1_armhf.deb 

If there is a lot of usage we can put it in a PPA or something like
that. Otherwise I see it as something that might be useful as an idea,
go enjoy playing with it.

Ted