title: "GSoC Coding Phase 2 Blog 2"

date: 2020-07-23T19:47:51+05:30

draft: false

categories: ["News", "GSoC"]

description: "Progress Report for the second half of the Google Summer of Code 2020 Phase 2 for the Baseline Images Problem"

displayInList: true

author: Sidharth Bansal

Google Summer of Code 2020's second evaluation is about to complete. Now we are about to start with the final coding phase. This post discusses about the progress so far in the last two weeks of the second coding period from 13 July to 26 July 2020.

We have divided the work in two parts as discussed in the [previous blog](https://matplotlib.org/matplotblog/posts/gsoc_coding_phase_blog_3/). The first part is the generation of the baseline images discussed below. The second part is the modification of the baseline images. The modification part will be implemented in the last phase of the Google Summer of Code 2020.

Now, we have started removing the use of the `matplotlib_baseline_images` package. After the changes proposed in the [previous PR](https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/17557), the developer will have no baseline images on fresh install of matplotlib. So, the developer would need to generate matplotlib baseline images locally to get started with the testing part of the mpl.

The images can be generated by the image comparison tests with use of `matplotlib_baseline_image_generation` flag from the command line. Once these images are generated for the first time, then they can be used as the baseline images for the later times for comparison. This is the main principle adopted.

We successfully created the `matplotlib_baseline_image_generation` flag in the beginning of the second evaluation but images were not created in the `baseline images` directory inside the `matplotlib` and `mpl_toolkits` directories, instead they were created in the `result_images` directory. So, we implemented this functionality. The images are created in the `lib/matplotlib/tests/baseline_images` directory directly now in the baseline image generation step. The baseline image generation step uses `python3 -mpytest lib/matplotlib --matplotlib_baseline_image_generation` command. Later on, running the pytests with `python3 -mpytest lib/matplotlib` will start the image comparison.

Right now, the matplotlib_baseline_image_generation flag works for the matplotlib directory. We are trying to achieve the same functionality for the mpl_toolkits directory.

Once the generation of the baseline images for `mpl_toolkits` directory is completed in the [current PR](https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/17793), we will move to the modification of the baseline images in the third coding phase. The addition of new baseline image and deletion of the old baseline image will also be implemented in the last phase of GSoC. Modification of baseline images will be further divided into two sub tasks: addition of new baseline image and the deletion of the previous baseline image.

Monday to Thursday meeting initiated at [11:00pm IST](https://everytimezone.com/) via Zoom. Meeting notes are present at HackMD.

I am grateful to be part of such a great community. Project is really interesting and challenging :) Thanks Thomas, Antony and Hannah for helping me so far.