[Scons-dev] Unit testing with mock?

Bill Deegan bill at baddogconsulting.com
Fri Oct 23 13:37:54 EDT 2015 

A thought.
If using the six module will be part of our 2.7/3.x port, then rather than
copying all that into our tree (which I would say was a reasonable solution
back when SCons started and pypi wasn't available or mature), perhaps it's
time to move to a virtualenv based development/distro flow.

You can see what they do in Buildbot here:
http://trac.buildbot.net/wiki/RunningBuildbotWithVirtualEnv

Not that I'm advising adding dependencies willy/nilly (Oh man am I the old
guy now), but reasonable dependency additions then become easily manageable.

Thoughts?

-Bill

On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 9:47 AM, Gary Oberbrunner <garyo at oberbrunner.com>
wrote:

> Python mocks are extremely useful. We use them in my day job and
> unit-testing that code would be pretty hard without them. The main
> counterargument to using them in SCons is that it introduces a dependency,
> and to date SCons can build and test with no external dependencies. But of
> course that's not _really_ true: many SCons tests test compilers and tools
> that are often not present, so those tests get skipped.That's one route you
> could take: if no mock module exists, skip the tests. But another way this
> has been done in SCons in the past is to copy the module into SCons, e.g.
> in the src/engine/SCons/compat subdir, with appropriate name changes. If
> the module in question's license permits this, and it's self-contained, why
> not do this? In this case it'd probably want to be under QMTest but the
> principle is the same.
>
> Quoting from src/engine/SCons/compat/__init__.py:
>
> *This subpackage holds modules that provide backwards-compatible*
> *implementations of various things that we'd like to use in SCons but
> which*
> *only show up in later versions of Python than the early, old version(s)*
> *we still support.*
>
>
> Other devs, what do you think?
>
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 12:27 PM, Paweł Tomulik <ptomulik at meil.pw.edu.pl>
> wrote:
>
>> This is the module I'm currently working on:
>>
>> https://github.com/ptomulik/scons-arguments
>>
>> for the moment 'devel' branch is more recent:
>>
>> https://github.com/ptomulik/scons-arguments/tree/devel
>>
>> Mocks are used in unit tests:
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/ptomulik/scons-arguments/blob/master/unit_tests/SConsArgumentsTests.py
>>
>> It's hard to tell what's the particular purpose of using mocks for a
>> particular project. It's rather a choice of testing philosophy. Mocks
>> always play same role: to isolate the behaviour of the object (or
>> method) being tested on other objects (or methods). That way less tests
>> get affected when a particular object changes its behaviour.
>>
>>
>> W dniu 23.10.2015 o 16:19, Bill Deegan pisze:
>> > Pawel,
>> >
>> > If the plan was to migrate SCons to 3.x and drop support for 2.7, then
>> > maybe using mocks would be ok now.
>> > But the plan is to support both for some time once we get SCons working
>> > with 3.x.
>> >
>> > What are you using mocks for now? Can you point to a repo?
>> > Note that thus far, the mocks module has not been used, so chances are
>> > it can be done without additional modules (though perhaps with more
>> code).
>> >
>> > -Bill
>> >
>> > On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 1:56 AM, Paweł Tomulik <ptomulik at meil.pw.edu.pl
>> > <mailto:ptomulik at meil.pw.edu.pl>> wrote:
>> >
>> >     So, what should I replace my existing mocks with? Do you know any
>> >     technique?
>> >
>> >     These mocks would only be required for unit-testing scons package,
>> so
>> >     this doesn't affect plain users (only developers and scons package
>> >     maintainers would be affected). And starting from 3.3, the mock
>> module
>> >     is part of python standard.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >     W dniu 23.10.2015 o 09:21, Alexandre Feblot pisze:
>> >     > Hi,
>> >     > Please, please, please,
>> >     > Don't!
>> >     > Don't force people to install additional modules.
>> >     > One of Python benefits is how rich its standard distribution is,
>> >     compared to perl for example, allowing to distribute code that you
>> >     know will work everywhere without additional requirement.
>> >     > Please don't break that.
>> >     >
>> >     > Alexandre
>> >     >
>> >     >> Le 22 oct. 2015 à 23:58, Pawel Tomulik <ptomulik at meil.pw.edu.pl
>> >     <mailto:ptomulik at meil.pw.edu.pl>> a écrit :
>> >     >>
>> >     >> Hi,
>> >     >>
>> >     >> If I would like to contribute a module to scons, would it be
>> >     acceptable
>> >     >> to use mocks (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mock) in unit tests?
>> From
>> >     >> what I see, none of the existsing unit tests in SCons use mocks,
>> >     perhaps
>> >     >> for a reason? Is it forbidden? Is there an alternative without
>> >     using the
>> >     >> module?
>> >     >>
>> >     >> The mock module is not included in the basic python distribution,
>> >     it has
>> >     >> to be installed, for example with pip (it's a backport of
>> >     unittest.mock
>> >     >> available in python >=3.3).
>> >     >>
>> >     >>
>> >     >> Best regards!
>> >     >>
>> >     >> --
>> >     >> Paweł Tomulik
>> >     >>
>> >     >> _______________________________________________
>> >     >> Scons-dev mailing list
>> >     >> Scons-dev at scons.org <mailto:Scons-dev at scons.org>
>> >     >> https://pairlist2.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/scons-dev
>> >     > _______________________________________________
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>> >     >
>> >
>> >
>> >     --
>> >     Paweł Tomulik, tel. (22) 234 7925
>> >     Instytut Techniki Lotniczej i Mechaniki Stosowanej
>> >     Politechnika Warszawska
>> >     _______________________________________________
>> >     Scons-dev mailing list
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>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Pawel Tomulik
>> _______________________________________________
>> Scons-dev mailing list
>> Scons-dev at scons.org
>> https://pairlist2.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/scons-dev
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Gary
>
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>
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