[Python-Dev] Testing tkinter on Linux

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 5:00 AM, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:
> I believe gui depends on the existence of the DISPLAY environment
> variable on unix/linux (that is, TK will fail to start if DISPLAY is not
> set, so _is_gui_available will return False).  You should be able to
> confirm this by looking at the text of the skip message in the buildbot
> output.

A recent buildbot log [1] shows that the GUI tests are being skipped,
although I'm not seeing the message. Where do I go to set DISPLAY for
the bot (which runs mostly in the background)?

Note that it's all running as root, which may make a difference to the
defaults, so this might have to be done more explicitly than it
otherwise would. (But root is quite happy to use X; running xclock
brings up a clock just fine.)

[1] http://buildbot.python.org/all/builders/AMD64%20Debian%20root%203.5/builds/210/steps/test/logs/stdio

ChrisA