[Gdal-dev] Re: GDAL 1.3.1 Alpha 2 Released

[Frank Warmerdam]

On 10/2/05, Howard Butler <hobu at iastate.edu> wrote:
> It is a happy coincidence that the gdalautotest suite has worked well
> to allow us to exercise the next generation bindings, but it is my
> understanding that they were developed to test GDAL itself, and not
> necessarily the script bindings.

Howard,

While that is true, it doesn't necessarily interfere with Ari's points
about why gdalautotest should be in the normal GDAL distribution.

> The testing suite as it currently stands can require many different
> drivers that are not enabled by default on all builds

The gdalautotest is smart enough to check for non-default drivers
and skip tests if they are not available.

> and contain
> significantly sized data to test the capabilities of certain drivers.
> I wouldn't want to bloat the distribution of GDAL with all of the
> test overhead.

As pointed out earlier, the test distribution isn't too big compared
to the GDAL source tree.  However, I anticipate that the amount of
test data may grow substantially over time and I am not prepared to
include the autotest in the main distribution to avoid bloat.

I would add that I am not especially keen on a "make test" type
option like some projects have.  I can't give a compelling reason for
this though.

> My third point is that the next gen bindings development has been
> disruptive enough without turning over the apple cart of testing at
> this time.

I like this.  Howard reconises that at least I am somewhat adverse
to changing too much at once.  Change makes me uptight.

> Another thing to add is that an even worse scenario is to have *two*
> test suites like MapServer has.  MapServer has the MapScript unit
> tests (which have good coverage of methods and calls) and the
> MapServer test suite which has coverage of the mechanicals of
> MapServer.  It has made it difficult to divine in an automated way
> what might be going on, and the fact that there are two different
> test harnesses with two different invocations unnecessarily adds to
> the developer overhead IMO.

I'm not sure that having two test suites is terrible, but in the case
of mapserver it has disapated some of the value of the test suites.

PS. I have no problem with Ari leaving a perl wrapper test in
the swig/perl directory as long as it is smallish.

Best regards,
--
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
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