[Eeglablist] EEGLAB test suite

[Yaroslav Halchenko]

Thank you Arnaud,

On Fri, 20 Aug 2010, Arnaud Delorme wrote:
> We have not spent a lot of time trying to make EEGLAB Octave Friendly.
> You may see this page though.
> http://sccn.ucsd.edu/wiki/EEGLAB_and_Octave
yeap -- was there ;-) I just wondered if there were any changes
since then behind the curtain ;)

> Nevertheless, it could still make sense to use Octave on clusters of
> computers and do visualization on a single workstation (avoiding the
> need to purchase multiple Matlab licenses).
That is one kind of basic usage scenario I also had in mind.  Few times
I have used EEGLAB for basic data conversion and preprocessing which,
theoretically, did not require any GUI/plotting per se.  

Additional future extension (if someone gets interested) could be 
exposing some interesting EEGLAB functionality to be used within other
processing pipeline interfaces, such as
http://nipy.sourceforge.net/nipype/ . For that no GUI/plotting would be
required from EEGLAB -- just I/O facilities and processing

> If someone is motivated to
> make part of the EEGLAB Octave compatible, we will open the code for
> him/her.
hm... do you mean
- providing commit rights
or
- exposing some additional code on top of what is in SVN already? ;)

> discontinued their efforts in 2007. However, we recently (2010) dig out
> their old code and incorporated their testsuite with our own EEGLAB test
> functions. There are now more than 600 test functions thats test almost
> all functions of EEGLAB (it does not mean that these functions work in
> all cases but it is a guarantee that at least they work - or do not
> crash - in some cases). If someone is interested in helping to maintain
> or develop further EEGLAB test cases, please let us know. Unlike EEGLAB,
> test cases are not under currently under SVN but we could easily create
> a repository.
That would be terrific and utterly useful. In my opinion, scientific
applications (especially for scripting languages/environments) MUST have
testing framework -- from unittests all the way to documentation.
In Python world it kinda becomes a convention that project comes with
unittests and there are doctests in addition which verify correctness of
the examples in documentation strings within the code and within the
documentation.  Makes it look nice and behave as expected on users'
systems.

so, why not just include this tests battery within eeglab itself?  I am
ok with separate repository, but I just wonder if it wouldn't be of
greater value and convenience to be within EEGLAB?

-- 
Yaroslav O. Halchenko
Postdoctoral Fellow,   Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834                       Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
WWW:   http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik