Re: [Gimp-print-devel] CUPS backend -- move to its own directory?

[Solomon P. <pi...@sh...>]

On Sun, May 19, 2019 at 10:16:04PM -0400, Robert Krawitz wrote:
> So one question, is there something useful that can be done with a
> smaller test space (e. g. not the full N-dimensional space, just
> varying one parameter at a time)?

Yeah, there's no need to exhaustively test the N-dimensional space.  I 
rarely bother test anything beyond resolution, print size, and 
(sometimes) lamination.  Once I add support for "expected failures" that 
will expand a little bit.

> That would help a lot.

I changed it to only test 1/1, 1/3, 3/1, and 3/3, and even with recent 
printer additions the test time is down to about 7.5 minutes.

> Is there any way you could have your test capture the output from the
> backend and compute a SHA on it, so you could use it as a regression
> test?  I understand it might not only be a byte stream that matters,
> but if you can find a way of encoding anything other than bytes into
> that stream, that would serve as well.  Basically the same kind of
> thing run-testpattern-2 does for checksum generation.  I could move
> compress-checksums and compress-checksums to some place more generic
> than src/testpattern.

The backend doesn't emit any printer data streams in these debug/test 
modes, and I don't consider the backend's informative logging output 
(other than CUPS attribute messages) to be a stable interface.  I have 
plans to change that (and also do things like emit JSON to make UI 
wrappers around the status inquires easier to work with) but that's 
pretty far down the to-do list..

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy			       pizza at shaftnet dot org
Coconut Creek, FL                          ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.