Questions RE: contributing to testing of Manim

Hi. In the README it mentions that

there is a dire need for tests

As I’m currently moving a quite a few of my own projects CI systems to GitHub Actions I was wondering if there is any general consensus or thoughts on how testing on Manim should go. Obviously animation is a tricky thing to test rigorously, but at least installation and some other basic tests can be started on.

I’m generally a fan of pytest, so unless there are strong objections if I were to start a testing PR on this before the end of the year would people be fine using pytest? Regardless, I have a question related to how to treat Manim in testing. Is Manim meant to be a library or an application? This may sound vauge, so I will just let Donald Stufft’s post “setup.py vs requirements.txt” and the pipenv website explain what I’m asking and why for me better than I can.

Thanks in general for all this nice work!

cc @3b1b @eulertour

[3b1b]

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for the inquiry and willingness to help, and apologies for a slow response. Pytest seems good, though I’ll admit to not knowing what the right considerations at play are here. Testing the look of the animations is probably very tricky, in no small part because it’s possible stylistic changes would be desirable without breaking all tests. Maybe the best way to start is with simple tests that ensure things don’t break, and that basic positional data lines up with expectations. For example, obj1.next_to(obj2, LEFT) should leave the x_component of obj1.get_right() smaller than that of obj2.get_left().

As to the question of library vs. application, I agree that it’s a little ambiguous at the moment. The end goal is probably be to separate the two, a library handling all manipulation of shapes, animations, etc., and an application for actually putting together scenes and animation. Where do you see it making the biggest difference for testing right now?

-Grant

[eulertour]

@matthewfeickert If you intend to make significant changes to manim I beseech you to join the discord. It’s much, much faster and more responsive than GitHub. It’s linked from the README in case you missed it.