[reportlab-users] Buglet and fix in HexColor (2.6 and probably before)

[Dinu Gherman]

Am 17.01.2013 um 19:18 schrieb Tim Roberts:


> Dinu Gherman wrote:

>> I noticed a bug in reportlab.lib.colors.HexColor when actually using the 

>> alpha parameter, e.g.:

>> 

>> In [1]: from reportlab.lib.colors import HexColor

>> In [2]: HexColor(16777215, alpha=0.5)

> 

> The "alpha" parameter is just a Boolean that identifies whether or not

> alpha is present in the first parameter.  So, to get the effect you

> asked for, you'd want:

>    HexColor( 0x80ffffff, alpha=True )


Correct. I was in a hurry when reporting this, maybe also the effect of 
not having a public bug tracker, as described here:

  http://www.reportlab.com/software/opensource/rl-toolkit/faq/#3.1

Still I think the signature is slightly misleading, even with a default
value for alpha=False, because color objects also have an alpha attribute
and one would assume the parameter to be stored as that attribute. 

And then there are different classes in this module with an alpha keyword
parameter meaning either a value in [0..1], [0..100] or [True, False]. In 
code I write I prefer the real intent being better expressed with names 
like is_alpha or has_alpha for such Booleans.


> The root of the problem is one missing set of parens around the

> (val>>24)&0xff term, which your patch adequately corrects.


Yes. I was looking now into reportlab-2.6/tests/test_lib_colors.py which
doesn't contain such basic tests for creating color instances. And it 
seems like it does not use unittest properly since it uses many plain 
assert statements and not unittest.TestCase.assertX methods... Maybe that's 
because it could also be run with py.test? Unfortunately not:

$ py.test -s test_lib_colors.py
========================================= test session starts =========================================
platform darwin -- Python 2.7.3 -- pytest-2.3.4
collected 0 items / 1 errors 

=============================================== ERRORS ================================================
_________________________________ ERROR collecting test_lib_colors.py _________________________________
test_lib_colors.py:7: in <module>

>   setOutDir(__name__)

/opt/lib/python2.7/site-packages/reportlab/lib/testutils.py:48: in setOutDir

>           assert name=='__main__',"setOutDir should only be called in the main script"

E           AssertionError: setOutDir should only be called in the main script
======================================= 1 error in 0.09 seconds =======================================

Anyway...

Regards,

Dinu