pytest adoption: current status (beginning of May)

[Thomas De Schampheleire]

Hi all,

So the official part of 'pytest adoption month' is over, so it's high
time to look back.

The main achievement is that py.test now can be used as test runner!
This has been the major accomplishment of the month, thanks to the
efforts of Marc and Ronny. Thanks to both of you to make this happen.

Visually, the output of py.test feels much cleaner and dense than
nosetests. However, the initial database setup code used to be silent
with nosetests, but is now spitting out a lot of data. Is it possible
to silence this?

Another point: it seems that py.test is currently not in Kallithea's
setup.py dependency list, meaning that nosetests is installed by
default but py.test is not. Shouldn't we change this?


Unfortunately, due to the amount of unforeseen issues in making this
happen, there has not been much other work in the test area.
Marc, Ronny: are you still interested in contributing in the test area
of Kallithea?
On https://bitbucket.org/conservancy/kallithea/wiki/TestingImprovements
I had listed some items, copy pasted-below for convenience:

1. One aspect I recently inquired about myself is related to fixtures
and the creation/modification of a repository for the execution of a
test. See http://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/kallithea-general/2015q1/000232.html
and Mads' reply:
http://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/kallithea-general/2015q1/000272.html.
Fixing this would probably require both help from pytest as internal
knowledge of Kallithea.

2. Improving existing tests to write them in a more pytest way

3. Misc improvements

  a. do not dump all test files in /tmp but rather in a subdirectory
  b. check why parallel test execution seems to fail (at least on
nosetests it does)
  c. investigate/profile why each test takes relatively long to
complete, while really most tests are making a simple http request and
check some output.


I guess that 3a is an easy fix for py.test experts but would render my
/tmp directory much more readable.

Item 1 has the highest value for me: I got blocked trying to write
such test, and it would be great to being able to continue here.

Item 3c and/or 3b could help in case it is possible to speed up the
overall test execution. Currently, on my laptop, the tests take about
900 seconds, which is pretty long IMO.


Looking forward to your feedback,
Thomas