Python test coverage needs improvement

[jelmer]

The test coverage for isso's Python code is very spotty; in order to be confident when making changes and adding features, we should make sure that all code at least has some degree of coverage.

[ix5]

To elaborate, the python unit tests are in isso/tests/.

To run Isso's unit tests, you can use python -m unittest discover isso/tests (or pytest installed via pip install pytest). - Edit: Simply run make test

We should probably update the docs that still recommend using nose since it won't run on current python versions and is abandoned by its creators. - Edit: Done

Any contributors experienced in python or unit testing are welcome to help out!

[Guts]

Maybe we could start by add a linter like flake8 to improve code reliability? We could also add it as a git hook through pr-commit to enforce code homogeneity and contributing guidelines?

If you want, I can push some PR.

[jelmer]

Code linting and enforcing style seems like a good idea (and I'd welcome a PR to add that), but it is unrelated to better tests.

[Guts]

but it is unrelated to better tests.

Woo @jelmer, you are quite harsh! I see a static analysis tool (linter) as a good complementary first step to better tests since it aims at improving software quality.

[jelmer]

My apologies, I didn't mean to come across as harsh. I'm not disagreeing with you about the usefulness of a linter in general and its potential contributions to code quality. But they're orthogonal, and a linter won't give us significantly more confidence merging new PRs.

[Guts]

No worries, I get it that we agree.

I've pushed a PR.

[ix5]

Maybe we could start by add a linter like flake8 to improve code reliability?

@Guts we already have flake8 (via make flakes), would you care to modify the config (inside setup.cfg so far) so that it catches more things?

[ix5]

As a reference point, this is the current coverage:

$ coverage report --omit='*/tests/*'
Name                        Stmts   Miss  Cover
-----------------------------------------------
isso/__init__.py              159     81    49%
isso/config.py                 84     14    83%
isso/core.py                   69     24    65%
isso/db/__init__.py            66      6    91%
isso/db/comments.py           135     19    86%
isso/db/preferences.py         17      0   100%
isso/db/spam.py                40      2    95%
isso/db/threads.py             15      0   100%
isso/dispatch.py               39     39     0%
isso/ext/__init__.py           10      0   100%
isso/ext/notifications.py     149     99    34%
isso/migrate.py               193     27    86%
isso/run.py                     7      7     0%
isso/utils/__init__.py         66     11    83%
isso/utils/hash.py             58      1    98%
isso/utils/html.py             50      3    94%
isso/utils/http.py             35     24    31%
isso/utils/parse.py            42      2    95%
isso/views/__init__.py         35      8    77%
isso/views/comments.py        491     90    82%
isso/wsgi.py                   87     17    80%
-----------------------------------------------
TOTAL                        1847    474    74%