Unitary and non regression testing of Scilab

Contents

Unitary and non regression testing of Scilab

before starting

Under Linux

If you receive the error Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library. when you start scilab in a terminal. do (as root or via sudo) :

$ cd /usr/lib/locale
$ ln -s en_GB.utf8 en_GB

(Replace en_GB with your locale)

On Ubuntu 11.04, you need to define LC_ALL

export LC_ALL="fr_FR.UTF-8"

Replace fr_FR with your locale. For example, if your locale is en_US, then use:

export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

This trick also works with Ubuntu 12.01.

On Ubuntu 11.10, you need to modify the file /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED and check that the locale is defined as UTF-8, for example:

fr_FR UTF-8
ja_JP UTF-8

and then execute:

sudo locale-gen fr_FR
sudo locale-gen ja_JP

Testing the Scilab distribution

All tests

Launch Scilab and type :

test_run()

It will run all the tests and provide this kind of output :

   01/153 - [cacsd] arma..........................................passed
   02/153 - [cacsd] odedi.........................................passed
   03/153 - [cacsd] slicot........................................passed
   04/153 - [completion] completion...............................passed
   05/153 - [core] auto...........................................failed  : dia and ref are not equal
[...]

At the end of all the testing, it will display the results.

Test only one module

test_run('time')

Test only one function

test_run('time','datenum')

Testing the source version of Scilab

Linux/Unix

To launch all the tests, in the root directory of the source tree, type :

cd $SCI
make check

To launch the test of one module, go in the root directory of the module and type :

make check

For example, the following commands will run all the tests for the core module.

cd $SCI
cd modules/core/
make check

Creating new test files (draft)

Very incomplete guide to create new tests. Compare these indications with existing tests.

unitary test files are stored per module in SCI/modules/MODULE/tests/unit_tests (where MODULE is the target module name).
to create a new test, add a .tst file holding scilab commands
this file should generate no output
it should signal errors by the construct if test_fails then pause; end, where test_fails must be set appropriately
generate the reference output of your test (though the test file must not generate any output, the execution of the test will issue the command lines):
test_run('module','function','create_ref');
your new test is ready

Troubleshooting

It may happen that, when we export the LC_ALL environment variable, we get the following message:

$ export LC_ALL="fr_FR.UTF-8"
bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (fr_FR.UTF-8): No such file or directory
[2]+  Done                    ~/Downloads/scilab-5.4.0/bin/scilab

This is because the locale is not fr_FR. In this case, we may know which locale is currently used with the "locale" command:

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

We can see that the LC_ALL variable is empty. Now, if we do:

$ export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

then the LC_ALL variable gets defined, and Scilab now works fine. More details on this topic are available at [1].

References

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Locale, Locale