[Mailman-Developers] MM3 REST API testing [was: Python 3]

[Andrew Stuart]

I feel like prefacing all my questions with an apology if it’s a dumb question.  Anyway...

What’s the advantage of using VCR over a set of tests that use Kenneth Reitz requests library to send HTTP queries to the API and have a look at the response to see if it contains the expected HTTP codes/data?

thanks



On 2 Jan 2015, at 3:40 pm, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

On Dec 27, 2014, at 01:16 PM, Florian Fuchs wrote:

> So far we haven't found a perfect solution for testing packages that
> rely heavily on the MM3 REST API. As far as mailman.client, Postorius
> and HK are concerned, testing without *some* core integration doesn't
> make too much sense IMO, because any changes in the API would go unnoticed.

I'm playing with a solution that involves the use of the 'vcr' package, which
as its name implies (well, at least for us, um, mature programmers ;) is a
facility to record and replay HTTP traffic.  It's compatible with both Python
2 and 3 and is available on the Cheeseshop.

So the basic idea is to set up an MM3 installation (`tox --notest -r`
suffices), then start up its REST server with a fresh mailman.db, and run the
test suite against it.   This will capture the traffic in a yaml file, which
we could ship with mailman.client.

Then to run the test suite, you'd use vcr in replay mode against the captured
yaml file.  Any time the API changes, you'd have to re-record the traffic
against a fresh database.

I have a branch that's working in this direction and it's promising, but I've
also had to rewrite the testing infrastructure for mailman.client, and make
some other changes.  It also points out what I think are some bugs in Mailman
core, so I'm working those out on my py3 branch in parallel.

It's not yet ready for review, but if you want to keep an eye on things, look
here:  lp:~barry/mailman.client/bilingual

Feel free to provide feedback on the approach, or the changes so far, but I
will submit a merge proposal when/if it's ready to go.

Cheers,
-Barry
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