Thursday, January 29, 2015

Some tests where not being run

I noticed that some test cases in Lino Welfare were not being run during the test suite. For example lino_welfare.projects.docs.tests. Fixed.

The LINO_CACHE_ROOT environment variable

Lino now makes use of a LINO_CACHE_ROOT environment variable. If this variable is set, then the cached data of demo databases are no longer written into the file tree of the source code repository but below the given directory.

On my machine I have now the following line in my .bashrc file:

export LINO_CACHE_ROOT=/home/luc/tmp/cache

Note that the path should be absolute and without a ~.

This feature was needed because we want to get Lino build on a continuous integratio site such as Travis CI. To enable it for Travis, I modified Lino’s .travis.yml file, changing:

script: fab initdb test

into:

script: export LINO_CACHE_ROOT=$(TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR) ; fab initdb test

(To be honest, I hope that this was the reason. Confirmation will follow.)

This feature caused quite some subtle internal changes. The changes which might cause problems when upgrading are:

• The Site attributes project_dir and project_name have slightly different meanings and default values, and they are no longer simple strings but unipath.Path objects.

• New Site attribute site_dir.

New API for defining demo databases

Users of atelier.fablib who used “demo databases” (which we now call “Django demo projects”, see atelier.fablib.env.demo_projects) must adapt their fabfile.py as follows:

Before:

add_demo_database('lino_welfare.projects.docs.settings.demo')

After:

add_demo_project('lino_welfare/projects/docs')

(I guess that I am the only one who needed to do this…)

About __all__

I removed the __all__ definitions from all modules.

The first reason is that they caused a problem when Mahmoud tried to build the docs:

Warning, treated as error:
/...lino/docs/api/lino.api.ad.rst:4: WARNING: __all__ should be a list of strings, not [u'Site', u'TestSite', u'Plugin', u'configure_plugin', u'_'] (in module lino.api.ad) -- ignoring __all__

Note that this warning is rather a false alert, and thus I’d call it a bug in the latest Sphinx version.

OTOH I am not a friend of __all__. Anyway it is not recommended to do from xxx import *. I never recommend to use it except for some special situations:

• lino/ad.py imports * from lino/api/ad.py. This module exists only for backwards compatibility.

• Another good reason for import * is when you extend a lino.core.plugin.Plugin.

Results from travis

Here is the first feedback from travis:

$ export LINO_CACHE_ROOT=$(TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR) ; fab initdb test
/home/travis/build.sh: line 41: TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR: command not found

The following might work better:

$ export LINO_CACHE_ROOT=$TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR ; fab initdb test

TODO

• Wenn man bei den Neuanträgen jemanden ablehnt, kommt ein internal server error

• Add a TestCase which automatically runs python manage.py test in every demo project.