[Soc-2010-dev] Status Report (testing-week 5)

[Leif Andersen]

This week has been one of my better weeks.  As usual, there were a few bumps
this week, but not too many.

This week dealt with two things:
1.  Image comparison
2.  UI, and thus wrapping unit tests in operators to insert into the UI.

Per Matt Estela's recommendation, I tried incorporating Perceptual Image
Diff http://pdiff.sourceforge.net/ into the tests to compare images.  The
pre-compiled binaries work fine, however, compiling from source presents a
bit of a problem, even with all of the listed dependencies installed, it
complains that several printf stamens are not declared.  I emailed the
developer and am waiting for a response.  This isn't my main priority.
 However, I will keep using PIL until such time as a tool like this works.

Getting tests in blender's UI represents some challenges that do not exist
when using CTest as a testing platform.  First of all, I thought a lot about
render tests.  If we use blender's current set of regression tests that
blender has, it shouldn't be very difficult to create a tool that allows a
developer to render a blend file, and than compare it to another image file,
and than write another tool to run all of the tests.  The problem is that
putting this into the GUI, which requires python 3.  And on top of that,
developing a good UI for this sort of thing can also be a bit tricky.
 Fortunately though, it still is trivial to wrap up unit tests inside an
operator, so ultimately, running the tests won't be too big of a deal, as
apposed to setting them up.  I also toyed with writing the operators
required in C, although this isn't as good of an idea as writing it in
python, where we could simply give developers a template file to use for
their tests, but it may still prove useful.

Next week should be interesting.  Starting on Wed.  and going to the end of
the week after that, I'll be out of town.  With that being said, I won't be
out of communication, but rather, I'll probably be spending less time on
IRC.  (I'll still try to attend the usual Sunday meeting, as well as
spending an hour or so online though).  I will respond to emails as
usual, albeit probably a bit slower.   I'll post an email specifically about
this to this list in case this portion of the review is missed.  I still
have more UI stuff planned next week, but mainly merging the UI and
rendering algorithms into one fluid tool, at which point I'll start
automating it.

~Leif Andersen
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