Re: [mawg] RE: Testsuites importants point wrap-up and post on the mailing list

On 26/01/2010 14:41, Joakim Söderberg wrote:
> II) Regarding testing the individual features, we can either:
> 
> 1)      Create some media files corresponding to the formats in scope,
> that contain metadata in that format. E.g. a jpg-file, with EXIF
> elements, an mp3 with ID3 etc.

as Raphael pointed out, depending on the format, this won't be a *media
file*, but rather a metadata file (e.g. MPEG-7).

> BUT then we will have to recommend a library (or other tool) to extract
> the metadata, since it should not be part of the test.

I'm not too sure about that; is it very relevant for us to commit (even
informally) to a particular software/library? Furthermore, the library
depends on the programming language...

>             2)   Or we produce a text or XML  (1)  file containing the
> native metadata elements and let it represent the metadata in assumed
> media file.E.G: <exif:INAM>Eiffel Tower</exif:INAM>
> 
>             An implementation reads the file, gets the relevant
> attribute and returns the correct “ma:” result.

As I pointed out, I think such a solution would be vain or even
counter-productive, as it would require implementations to be able to
parse this artificial format, which would not be used outside our test
suites. Furthermore, what would guarantee that an implementation passing
the test with the artificial format would *also* behave correctly with
embeded metadata?


However, I think that providing such files would be a good idea, but for
a different reason: they would help implementors to check that their
implementation extract the legacy metadata in a way which is consistent
with what we expect. This would *not* be a part of the test (as it would
only test the extraction library, not the ma: mapping), but this would
definitely help implementors to understand what is wrong if their
implementation fails a test -- help them debug the implementation or
help us debug the test suite, as we may err in our making of the
media/metadata files...

  pa