[DRAFT] Introduce Qt test automation bridge and gui functional tests

[johnny9]

This PR introduces an optional Qt test automation bridge and adds a first suite of GUI functional tests for bitcoin-qt.

The goal is to improve GUI testability and reduce reliance on manual regression testing for all of the gui flows.

Starting as a draft to get a conversation going.

• New CMake option: ENABLE_TEST_AUTOMATION (default OFF)
• New runtime arg: -test-automation=
• New files:
• src/qt/testbridge.h
• src/qt/testbridge.cpp

The test automation bride creates a unix socket server that has a simple json protocol defined in src/qt/testbridge.h.

The bridge adds the following commands to enable end to end gui validation
• list_windows
• get_active_window
• get_current_view (alias: get_current_page)
• get_property
• click
• set_text
• wait_for_window
• wait_for_view (alias: wait_for_page)
• wait_for_property
• get_text
• save_screenshot
• list_objects

Build:

• -DBUILD_GUI=ON
• -DENABLE_WALLET=ON
• -DENABLE_TEST_AUTOMATION=ON

Run:

• test/functional/test_runner.py gui_node_window.py
• test/functional/test_runner.py gui_settings_persistence.py
• test/functional/test_runner.py gui_wallet_lifecycle.py
• test/functional/test_runner.py gui_wallet_receive.py
• test/functional/test_runner.py gui_wallet_security.py
• test/functional/test_runner.py gui_wallet_send.py
• test/functional/test_runner.py gui_wallet_send_advanced.py

[DrahtBot]

The following sections might be updated with supplementary metadata relevant to reviewers and maintainers.

Reviews

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Type	Reviewers
Concept ACK	w0xlt

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Conflicts

Reviewers, this pull request conflicts with the following ones:

• #762 (Update about logo icon (colour) to denote the chain type of the QT instance in About/ Help Message Window/ Dialog by pablomartin4btc)
• #bitcoin/bitcoin/34931 (validation: abort on DB unreadable coins instead of treating them as missing by furszy)
• #bitcoin/bitcoin/34872 (wallet: fix mixed-input transaction accounting in history RPCs by w0xlt)
• #bitcoin/bitcoin/33974 (cmake: Check dependencies after build option interaction by hebasto)
• #bitcoin/bitcoin/31260 (scripted-diff: Type-safe settings retrieval by ryanofsky)

If you consider this pull request important, please also help to review the conflicting pull requests. Ideally, start with the one that should be merged first.

[DrahtBot]

🚧 At least one of the CI tasks failed.
_{Task lint: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gui/actions/runs/23009276310/job/66814867840
LLM reason (✨ experimental): Python linting failed (ruff detected unused import and lint-files.py reported 7 failed tests).}

Hints

Try to run the tests locally, according to the documentation. However, a CI failure may still
happen due to a number of reasons, for example:

• Possibly due to a silent merge conflict (the changes in this pull request being
  incompatible with the current code in the target branch). If so, make sure to rebase on the latest
  commit of the target branch.

• A sanitizer issue, which can only be found by compiling with the sanitizer and running the
  affected test.

• An intermittent issue.

Leave a comment here, if you need help tracking down a confusing failure.

[w0xlt]

Very interesting and necessary. Concept ACK.