WeeChat Tester's Guide
----------------------

Many thankful users ask us how can they help developing WeeChat. The
easiest (and also most tricky) way to help developing WeeChat is
testing!

Testing is very important part of software development and should not
be underestimated. When some features are implemented it should be
tested, but for some features there are too many use cases or these
cases are tricky and developers can't try out every case. For example:
notorious charset plugin introduced in WeeChat 0.2.2: noone of us
(developers, contributors and testers) used channels with national
characters in their names and when 0.2.2 was released we got flooded
by russian users blaming us. If we have more testers it should not
happen again in future.

Testing stable version of WeeChat is pointless because developers are
busy implementing new stuff (and fixing old bugs) all the time. Fresh
code (with fresh bugs and fresh features) is stored in GIT
repository. Debian users can visit http://debian.flashtux.org/ and get
built and packaged GIT version of WeeChat. Gentoo users can get ebuild
from http://weechat.flashtux.org/download.php . ArchLinux users can
fetch PKGBUILD from http://aur.archlinux.org .

You may decide to build it manually. GIT version can be built and
installed in parallel to stable version. You don't need root access,
you don't need to sacrifice stable version of WeeChat.

    mkdir ~/weechat-git
    cd ~/weechat-git

To fetch code you can use GIT client or your favourite downloading app.
If you have GIT installed:

    git-clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/weechat.git
    cd weechat
    ./autogen.sh
	
If you don't:

    wget http://weechat.flashtux.org/download/weechat-devel.tar.bz2
    tar -xjvf weechat-devel.tar.bz2
    cd weechat-devel

To build:

    ./configure --prefix=$HOME/weechat-git

    You should end up with output like this:

    Interfaces........................ : ncurses
    Build with GNUtls support......... : yes
    Build with flock support.......... : yes
    Build with Plugin support......... : yes
                  Perl plugin......... : yes (5.8.8)
                  Python plugin....... : yes (2.4)
                  Ruby plugin......... : yes (1.8)
                  Lua plugin.......... : no 
                  Aspell plugin....... : yes
                  Charset plugin...... : yes
    Compile with debug info........... : yes
                  Backtrace........... : yes
    Build doc..........................: html pdf
    Print debugging messages.......... : no

These are features WeeChat will be built with. If something you need
is disabled, you need to install dependencies (and couple of -dev
packages if you're using debian or ubuntu). In my case i don't build
Lua plugin because i don't use scripts in Lua. If you need Lua,
install Lua package using your package manager. And relaunch
./configure script. When you're satisfied with build options run:

	make
	make install

If everything went fine and you're not bored yet (building can take a
while) you can run GIT version of WeeChat by executing:

	~/weechat-git/bin/weechat-curses

If you don't want to share configuration between stable and GIT
versions you can run WeeChat with --dir parameter:

	~/weechat-git/bin/weechat-curses --dir ~/.weechat-devel

If you're still awake you should see familiar interface and brag about
having newest possible version of WeeChat. ;) Now if you experience
strange behavior (it may have issues or crash or boil your beer) don't
hesitate to join #weechat at FreeNode and tell us. If it doesn't crash
- tell us too, we need your feedback!

If you're brave enough to use GIT version for everyday chit-chat you
may like to automate rebuilding of fresh version. Create new file
("rebuild.sh" in our case) in your favourite text editor, paste
following in it and make sure "#!/bin/sh" is first line of file:

--- FILE START ---
#!/bin/sh
mkdir ~/weechat-git
cd ~/weechat-git
git-clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/weechat.git
cd weechat
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=$HOME/weechat-git
make
make install
--- FILE END ---

Now make file executable:

    chmod +x rebuild.sh

If you've done everything right you will be able to get fresh GIT
version of WeeChat by simply launching this script (it can be done by
cron if you're running your computer 24/7).

Useful links:
Bug tracker: https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=weechat
RSS of WeeChat GIT commits (notifications about all new features and
bugfixes): http://weechat.flashtux.org/rss-commits.php

--
WeeChat team, 2008-01-10
http://weechat.flashtux.org/