[Ifeffit] testing ravelware

[Matt Newville]

Bruce,

I believe one can programmatically fill in form data and send
virtual events to a Tk-based GUI, which is essentially pushing all
the buttons, and may have been what Shelly was getting at.  The
callback routines for "the real calculations" can definitely be run
programmatically with various input data (and wasn't the original
post about phase-corrections???).  This might be difficult or easy
for athena/artemis, depending on how they're implemented:  Perl's
anonymous closures can only be tested by sending virtual events. But
if it's worth the time to formally test these programs, it might be
worth some effort to make them more easily testable, no?

To be honest, I'm not sure how many bugs regression tests for
Ifeffit would have found in the past year:  most of the problems
have been in new features, obscure corners that may have been missed
even by "thorough tests", or platform-specific bugs.  There were
several problems dealing with data files with unexpected formats,
which is hard to predict, and hard to say that "failure" of a test
necessarily means the program should be changed.

Still, I think any such testing (by primates of any sort or by
machine, of any GUI or of underlying libraries) is a fine thing to
do.  But without the "trusted results" you mentioned, I don't see a
huge difference between using and testing.  And I'd guess that
deciding on these trusted results is 90% of the work.

--Matt