replaying mouse and keyboard input for benchmarks

[William Cohen]

Someone mentioned Gtk+ Event Recorder (gerd), 
http://www.gtk.org/~timj/gerd/, as means of recording keyboard and mouse 
input into a desktop application, so the benchmarks are run under the 
same conditions. Has anyone else looked at gerd recently? Anyone know of 
a version that will work on FC2?

I have played around with it a little and got it to work on RHL9 and 
RHEL3, but it has problems on FC2. On FC 2 the version of gtk is newer 
that what gerd can use.

I was able to record and replay events for gimp with gerd. gerd uses a 
LD_PRELOAD to force a wrapper library to be loaded and record events. 
Programs like ooffice and mozilla which use a shell script to start up 
the program don't get events recorded. I also noticed that gerd also 
records the delays of moving the mouse. For benchmarks it would be 
desirable to have things selected as quickly as possible rather than at 
the rate the user selects them.

Another suggestion is to make use of the accessiblity layer to allow a 
benchmarking program to know when a menu is available. Is there an 
ordering of between screen and accessibility layer events? Screeen is 
always updated before information is sent to accessibility layer? 
Information always sent to accessibility layer before screen update? Or 
a race coding and no ordering is guaranteed. For the benchmarking it is 
rather important to know what order they occur. If the information is 
sent to the accessibility layer before the screen update, then the work 
for the screen update will not be counted.

-Will