Re: automated (or otherwise) tests for graphics code?

[Søren Hauberg]

tor, 16 10 2008 kl. 13:45 -0400, skrev John W. Eaton:
> We seem to be having a lot of regressions in the graphics code
> lately, so maybe it is time to start thinking of some way to provide
> tests for these functions.  Unfortunately, I don't have any good way
> to do automatic tests for most of the graphics functions since the
> results are visual.  But at least we could have an informal agreement
> that no changes should be pushed unless a make check works and also
> all the graphics demos run successfully.  I know that running all the
> demos could be tedious, but it is also troublesome to have to keep
> chasing bugs after nearly every change in the plotting functions...
> 
> To make it easier to run demos, I added a new function called rundemos
> that can be used this way:
> 
>   rundemos plot
> 
> to run all the demos in all the files in a given directory in the path
> (in this case, the plot subdirectory).  Without any arguments,
> rundemos runs all demos in all .m files in the load path.
> 
> Comments?

Seems like a hard task. Perhaps gnuplot has a testing framework we can
tab into? Otherwise me might generate a pdf file (using latex or
texinfo) that contains a bunch of plots along with brief descriptions of
what the plots should look like. I guess it would be fairly fast to look
through such a document to verify that things look correctly...

Søren

> 
> jwe