[vtk-developers] Regression testing examples

[David Doria]

Hi all,

The examples section of the wiki is getting very large
(http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/VTK_Examples). I have been working to get
them all to meet VTK coding guidelines and I believe they are now at
that point. It would be very helpful if these could maintained in a
non-wiki format. First, operations like 'grep' become usable. It is
sometimes hard to find things in big folders full of code without grep
- forget about it on a wiki! Second, the examples are not regression
tested so as the interfaces to the library evolve, the examples will
start to degrade and become non-compilable.

Ken mentioned that we should put these in the testing directory. I
think that the purpose of the tests is to ensure that OTHER code
works. The purpose of testing the examples is to make sure that the
examples themselves still work. This is very different. Also (from my
experience), people typically think of a testing directory as a
cryptic jungle of comment-less code where an examples directory should
be a place to go to learn how to use things. I don't think it is
necessary to write tests for the examples, but ensuring they compile
and link is much better than letting them rot on a webpage.

I propose doing one of two thigns:
a) Put the examples in the existing VTK/Examples directory

b) Make the examples a separate repository (like VTKData) so that
users don't need to download the many examples unless they actually
want them.

In both cases, we would set up dummy tests to report only compilation
and linking errors.

At some point a web interface could be provided, but I think the first
step is to get them into a position to be regression tested.

What do you think? I've been talking about this for a while now, but
it is getting big enough to actually be tough to maintain so it would
be nice to start the transition. As I move them to their new home, it
would be a good time to review them to ensure the necessary
comments/images are in place to make them as useful/clear as possible.

Thanks,

David