Dependencies & tests

[ArnaudPel]

Hello,

Just wanted to leave a note since I perused your project a bit to decide whether I should use it in ours. If I understand correctly, this project is aiming at being a sort of 'format converter' between different types of robots input/output files.

First, when keeping that objective in mind, the dependency on matplotlib seems a bit heavy when you may just want to integrate it in a web service.

Second and most important, code without tests is broken by design. How are we supposed to know what this lib is actually doing without any functional tests ? I mean, how do you know it works at all ? Adding a few 'input' test files and checking the result of their parsing shouldn't be too time consuming for example.

I may have considered contributing a bit, but this is putting me off.

[Zulko]

Hello,

Thanks for looking into this project. As you noticed there is no test coverage (it is developed under time pressure and very fast-changing formats) so the only warranty I can give now is that we use it a lot and it works for us. Test coverage and better docs are coming in the next ~3 months, to give you a time frame.

I'm really keen on contributions and happy to accomodate (e.g. by making matplotlib optional, or writing test units for the sections you may rely on).

May I ask what you intend to use the library for / what kind of contributions you have in mind ?

[ArnaudPel]

Thank you for your quick reply. Not sure how much I'm allowed to disclose, so let's just say I work for a biotec company. As of now I think this lib could be useful to us for exporting instructions to a robot and parsing the results back. But again, without tests that I can read, I don't really know.

Since there is no way I'm going to push code (especially parsers) in production without it being properly tested, my contributions would first be in that area. Then, if we need to write new parser(s) for our own purposes, I'd happily push them to this repo, provided my boss is ok.

Before the 3 months ETA you mentioned, would you be able to push a few input files, that this lib can parse, and a few output files, that it can export ? Just to give an idea.
Many thanks

[Zulko]

No problem, but it will be more efficient if you give me an idea of what kind of input/output you are interested in (from/to which machine(s) in particular ?).

EDIT: if you don't want to disclose the info on github, you can send a direct message per email (there is a contact email in each git repository).