[Python] CI and BDD with Python

I warmly recommend Jenkins (i.e. Hudson) for anything CI. It gives you tons
of plugins and configuration options together with full information
awareness about your build status and dependencies through a nice web
interface.

The only reason to go native here is that it may become simpler to set up
Python build and test jobs. But given that it's usually just a couple of
shell commands that you write once, you'd miss more from the interface than
what you gain from a quicker job setup.

Stefan

I'm kind'a partial to Morelia for BDD.

Don't be fooled by Ruby's RSpec - it's _not_ "BDD". In my exalted
opinion. "BDD" means "your customer gives you requirements as
sentences, and you make them into executable statements." That's what
Cucumber does, which Morelia learns from.

And BDD and CI are orthogonal. BDD should be part of a complete TDD
test suite, and your CI tool should run that.

I still like CruiseControl.rb - even though it has bugs when it sees
too many git integrations. Hudson had way too many features, and CCrb
mildly presumes you know how to operate its .cruise/projects folder
manually!

Thanks. FWIW I played with a bunch (Freshen, Morelia, Lettuce....) over the last few days and Lettuce appears to be the most "actively" maintained and closest to a cucumber-like implementation IMHO. I have decided to adopt it for now. I played with a few CI servers but Jenkins (Hudson) is tough to beat IMHO but I am sure this is just my personal preference. Anyways thanks for the help. Cheers, Mark

Morelia is "undermaintained" because it's finished. It attaches to any
pre-existing TestCase-style test runner, hence there's nothing to
maintain!

Packages like Lettuce rebuild the entire TestCase back-end just to
change the front end. That forces its maintainer to then do the Red
Queen thing, and constantly compete with all other test runners just
to stay in place. Props for the effort, though..!

It looks good! But it's not yet in Debian :-(

I've filed bug report #633411 <URL:http://bugs.debian.org/633411> to
call for an interested Python programmer to package it for Debian.

Tx - I never added anything to a distro before! But..!

'sudo pip install morelia' just worked for me, on Ubuntu. I don't
think a python-morelia aptitude package would add any value. Such test
rigs shall never have any embedded C code or other shenanigans.

If I needed to think of a feature to add, it would be P<name> notation
in the regular expressions, to then enforce the names of the matching
arguments. But this is fluff; real programmers can do without it. If I
worked closer to the center of the BDD thought leadership I'd know
what else to add...

The problem with ?pip? is that it's a parallel package installation that
ignores the available package management system on the OS.

That's not a fault of ?pip? or Setuptools or PyPI or the rest; but it's
a higher maintenance burden for the user than getting a package from the
same system that provides all the rest of their packages on the
computer.

On operating systems with poor package management, Python's distutils
and PyPI etc. are better than nothing. But on an OS like Debian with
good package management already for free software, it's a step backward
to rely on external dependencies from a disjoint package system.
I think it would add great value, since without it I'm unlikely to
bother using Morelia in any project. The maintenance burden is too high
to keep adding dependencies that come from a distinct dependency system
outside my OS.

pip freeze! Specifically, we already added pip freeze and virtualenv
support to our project's fab file...
I can see that would matter to projects you would want to uninstall,
but not Morelia...

Two of my feature requests for Morelia:

- integrate with the test runner (nose etc.) to provide one
dot . per passing step

- insert a long multi-line abstract string (typically
XML) with inside [[CDATA-style escaping tags

- the ability to stub a step as <not passing yet>

- the ability to pass a | delimited | table into a step
as an argument containing an array, instead of unrolling
the table into multiple calls to one step

- a rapid conversion to an HTML report, with folding blocks,
as an instant project documentation.

Lack of the second option is why we _didn't_ use M for the BDD test
runner on our latest project. (The onsite customer is an XML-freak,
AND the lead architect until I can manage to retire him upstairs!;)

But if I could put those four in, then write a disposable script that
converted our XML "project definition" file back into Morelia-Cucumber-
Gherkin notation, I'd have Morelia back in our project!

Just curious: Do you manage to stay within debian packages and have
all the python packages you want/need at the versions that are most
convenient?

For myself, until recently my debian testing did not even give
python2.7.

When that's not the case, I consider it not a status quo to live with,
but a problem to be addressed.

There's no "pip uninstall", though.

Stefan

That nose keeps reminding me of the start of one of the Pirates of the
Caribbean movies...