Re: Mayavi: testing: good news

Gael Varoquaux wrote:
> Very cool. This is indeed a "big deal", as your commit message mentions
> it.

Thanks.

> I had a quick go at checking out if I could modify mlab to
> work in such a "null backend" mode. I think it might be possible. Right
> now what seems to be that engine.add_source creates a scene.
> 
> Here is what I propose: have an option to turn on this null backend
> behavior. In this mode, the code base would follow the pattern that you
> have started to create object on the pipeline, but not really turn them
> live. This would allow us to test a fair amount of the scripting layer of

Actually what we could do is create a dummy scene that doesn't really do 
anything.  Then you wouldn't have to change much, although I wouldn't 
encourate too much testing with that since these really go in the 
category of integrationtests and not unittests.

> mayavi, with or without mlab. A good fraction of our examples could then
> run non-interactively, and thus be easier to test. We could also easily
> write a fair amount of tests.
> 
> Does this sound feasible, or am I missing something?

This might be possible if you aren't manipulating the camera or maybe 
that would work too but I am not sure.  I did not go along that route 
since my first priority was to get the core objects tested as pure and 
simple unit tests.

I have some plans for creating a dummy render window that I'll look at 
tomorrow.  Lets see.  We can add a null-backend as you say once I figure 
out the best way to do this.

cheers,
prabhu