Please consider creating automated tests

[olebole]

Hi,

since it seems that PyBDSF is one of the popular packages of KERN (@gijzelaerr reported about this), I am thinking about packaging it for Debian based on the KERN package.

One of the things that would help me a lot were automated tests, with pytest or so:

1. They could be run during package build, ensuring that the package works well on all our supported platforms

2. They could be run regularly on the installed package to ensure that it works in the evolving environment of Debian (new versions of astropy, scipy etc.).

The tests that are in the test subdirectory seem to be interactive, right? Would it be possible to add some automated tests?

[tammojan]

The test tbdsf_process_image.py is not interactive, and as far as I know tests a lot of functionality. At the very least, it often breaks (usually at boost linking problems), so I've found it a useful test.

[tammojan]

While the tests are arguably not proper, they are run regularly on travis, see https://github.com/lofar-astron/PyBDSF/blob/master/.travis.yml#L18