A "test" makefile target would be great.
For example, using the latest CVS version of the GIFT, I was able to
run gift-add-collection on a collection, and query it for a random
set of images. No problem. However, whenever asking for any similar
images, it failed.
Well of course I meant an actual similarity query. From my point of
view getting random images is not really a query (though that is how
it appears in MRML and the code). Originally (before MRML) I did this
in the interface, not by querying.
:-) Yes, of course... My example was a rather over-simplified way of
illustrating that some parts may work when others don't.
Testing that we get *a* result doesn't really prove that the images in
the result are at all similar to the query image(s). But then again,
it's better than nothing.
I'm not sure if it's doable in the GIFT, but it could be handy to be
able to break out parts of the code to be used in some sort of "unit
tests", to assure that image A is still quite similar to image B but
not to image C, etc. The sources could be distributed with a handful
of images that can be used for the unit-tests. With a controlled set
of images we could also test that the server produces a predictable
result over and over again. (Apart from the random stuff).
But this is obvious of course...
Unfortunately I don't know enough about the inner workings of the GIFT
to be of any help on this.
(But I would love having tests like this, when playing with the code)