Regression tools For Batik: Regard(Regression Guard :-)

[Vincent Hardy <vi...@eng.sun.com>]

Hello,

Regard, the name, is an idea from Sheng who works with me on SVG here.
Sheng has put together a proposal for a regression tool that would
help us, we think, in our development. The idea is to have a tool that
would automatically detect many kinds of regressions. Sheng has split
that into two tools, as follows. 
Thanks for having a look and sending us comments. We are planning 
to start actively work on this (and leverage Thierry's JPEG transcoder)
next week.

Cheers.
V.

Tool name: Regguard1

Description:

This tool will take the directory name of test pool(storing all the 
SVG test files for Batik) as the input parameter. Using the SVG2JPG 
facility of Batik, it runs the current version of the Batik
code against the test files and stores each of the result as a JPEG
file, 
under a "ref" directory at the same level with test pool.  

Tool Name: Regguard2

Description:

This tool will assume that the Regard1 has been applied to the project 
and there's already a reference pool for the test files (SVG and JPEG). 
Every time the developer wants to check in their code back to the code
base, 
they should run this tool first to make sure there are no regressions.
This tool will run the latest version of the Batik code against
all the SVG test files and generate JPEG files for each of them, storing 
them in another directory named "cmp". Then it will take the JPEG files 
under "ref" directory as a reference and compare them with their
counterparts under "cmp" and output their difference, if any, for the 
developer to know where there are regressions.