Mayavi: testing: good news

Hi,

In the past I was complaining that it was hard to write tests for mayavi 
because it needs the UI.  Well, thats not true anymore.  I've made a 
small change to the pipeline_base.py code that allows us to create/run 
tests without creating any user interface or a UI or even using 
offscreen rendering.  This means we can write non-interactive tests for 
the core mayavi.  As a proof of concept I've checked in 
enthought/mayavi/tests/test_array_source.py which is based on the 
earlier integration test of the same name but now a non-interactive 
test.  Take a look to see how it works.  These tests are not image based 
but data based but IMHO they serve the purpose very well.

We'll add more tests to cover the core code over the next few months.

As a note to any folks making checkins into mayavi, I think I'm going to 
start insisting on tests for most or all checkins in the future, there 
isn't any excuse anymore.  I've been a big culprit on my mlab_source 
changes (but that was necessary given the circumstances).  In any case, 
I've made amends and over the next few months we'll hopefully have more 
non-interactive tests. :)

cheers,
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-- 
Prabhu Ramachandran                 http://www.aero.iitb.ac.in/~prabhu