Here are some comparisons of the legacy plplot-test-interactive.sh approach with the new test_interactive target.
legacy: It works only for installed examples via "make test_interactive" for Makefile+pkg-config build system for those examples. Since this is all done with a script, no parallel testing is possible. Currently the -np option is not used (although somebody could easily change that if they wanted to continue to support this legacy system) which means lots of user clicking to get through the test. The dependency tracking is quite limited. new: It works both for the build tree (with BUILD_TEST=ON) and installed examples (using the new CMake-based build system for those examples). If the CMake Generator supports it, it can do the interactive tests in parallel (which is actually a big advantage now since most tests display the results on screen and quit automatically [thanks to the -np option] with no user intervention required.) The dependency tracking is much more extensive than in the legacy approach. Furthermore, there are lots of individual targets such as test_c_tk, and test_tk_0[1-4] (use "make help|grep test" to determine a complete list of both noninteractive and interactive test targets) that can be used for individual tests for special purposes if you don't want to invoke all interactive tests using the test_interactive target (or all noninteractive tests using the test_noninteractive target). legacy: The plplot-test-interactive.sh shell script is full of modern bashisms that are unlikely to work for win-bash. Also, it is probably going to take a lot of effort if someone wants to get the current Makefile+pkg-config approach to work on Windows (say with nmake). new: The implementation is is based on CMake so should essentially work on all platforms with the appropriate CMake Generator for each platform. There is some scripting, but it is just a modest extension to the plplot-test.sh + test_*.sh scripts that already have proved to work fine (under ctest) for Windows and win-bash. Thus, there is a good chance it will work out-of-the-box for that platform, but that needs testing (and possible adjustment) to make sure of that. legacy: The devices that are tested are just xwin, tk, xcairo, gcw, wxwidgets, and qtwidget. Adding more interactive devices should be straightforward if anybody is interested. new: The devices that are tested are _all_ enabled devices with an ":I:" designation (for interactive) in cmake/modules/drivers-init.cmake. The above list is just an (admittedly important) subset of those. legacy: It includes tests of the following special applications: extXdrawable_demo, plplotcanvas_demo, plplotcanvas_animation, plplotcanvas_demo.py, plplotcanvas_animation.py, wxPLplotDemo, qt_example, the four Tk demos, the plgrid example (using plserver), and all the standard examples using plserver. It also includes ext-cairo-test which is actually a non-interactive test (which was forgotten in the legacy Makefile+pkg-config test_noninteractive target). new: As of revision 10842 it includes tests of all of the above (except ext-cairo-test which is covered by the test_noninteractive target). In sum, the new CMake-based test_interactive target and all the individual interactive test targets it depends on constitutes a much better system than the legacy approach for our developers to do comprehensive and flexible testing of interactive PLplot. A similar comment applies for the CMake-based test_noninteractive target compared to ctest in the build tree or the legacy Makefile+pkg-config test_noninteractive target for the installed examples. That does leave the question of what to do for the legacy test_interactive and test_noninteractive targets that are based on the Makefile+pkg-config build system for the installed examples and the legacy ctest system that works in the build tree which has now been superseded by the test_noninteractive target. The Makefile + pkg-config approach is still quite popular (at least in the Unix world) and ctest (despite its deficiencies with regard to parallel tests and dependencies) does have some interesting dashboarding possibilities. Therefore, since I am a lot more interested in the CMake-based test_noninteractive and test_interactive targets, I plan to do just minimal maintenance of the legacy pkg-config+Makefile targets and ctest unless some other developer who wants to do more with any of those steps forward. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
