Cannot run unit tests on github test runner

[jeffpeck10x]

I have asked about this before in the nebula issue tracker, but will try again here in case maybe anybody has any insights.

We have some straightforward unit tests of custom layers with @deck.gl/test-utils, creating the layer with some props and check the state afterwards in onAfterUpdate. These have been working without issue when run locally with jest using the headless-gl context.

We have been running these on the github actions test runner for some time without issue as well, with one caveat: They only worked on Ubuntu 18.

A couple months ago (or so) github has retired their Ubuntu 18 instances and now they are failing with error messages like this:

matching of MultiIconLayer({id: 'my-id'}): initialization of MultiIconLayer({id: 'my-id'}): GLSL compilation error in fragment shader multi-icon-layer-fragment-shader-1: 0:49(15): error: syntax error, unexpected BUFFER, expecting ',' or ';'

We are running the unit tests on the runner like this:

xvfb-run -s "-ac -screen 0 1280x1024x24" yarn test

as suggested in the headless-gl docs.

I am wondering if there is some additional option that needs to be passed there to account for whatever changed post-Ubuntu-18.

Has anyone else encountered this? If not, how are you doing unit testing on your custom layers in modern instances?

[jeffpeck10x]

I have traced this to the use of the word buffer in certain places like the multi-icon-layer-fragment-shader. If I manually do:

source = source.replace(/\bbuffer\b/g, '_buffer_');

inside node_modules/@luma.gl/webgl/dist/es5/classes/shader.js before running the unit test, it works!

This seems to be a problem with headless-gl, and as noted above, this previously worked with headless-gl on Ubuntu 18.

But, I also wonder if buffer is a reserved word that should not be used.

Looking through the code, it looks like this was actually "fixed" here:
f864ea3

Although, we are still on deckgl 8, so I will try to find a way to make this work now that I figured out the problem.

I hope this helps anyone else who finds this and is stuck on it.

[jeffpeck10x]

I ended up using patch-packages to patch deck.gl with the same change as in f864ea3

I also needed to update the dist/ contents. Just fyi in case anybody needs to do the same!