[sugar] Testing, mocking dbus

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

Ian Bicking wrote:
> Well, I made my first commit.  It's not terribly impressive, just the 
> beginnings of some testing.  It's in sugar.testing.mockdbus, and 
> sugar/presence/test_presence.txt.
>
> After writing the test, I realized the client interface for presence 
> is really boring and probably not worth testing.  I'll try again with 
> the server/service site, which may require mocking out some more parts 
> of dbus.
>

Yeah the service is the interesting part to test.

> Another thing that comes up is the test infrastructure, i.e., how we 
> run tests.  There's a couple options:
>
> * We set up tests using unittest.  We collect all the tests manually 
> (with lots of imports) and have a runner that runs them all.  And then 
> we start hacking in various ways to select individual tests (e.g., 
> only tests that run quickly, only tests of a certain portion of the 
> codebase).  This works.  It's annoying.  It only uses the stdlib.
>
> * We use a test runner that does this for us.  This is what I'd 
> recommend.  I used nose for this (http://nose.python-hosting.com/) and 
> I like it well enough.  It requires a bit of fiddling to get it to 
> find all the tests you want it to find, which we'd probably put into a 
> shell script (also to fix up PYTHONPATH, e.g., to use the sugar 
> checkout).
>
> If we use nose, we also probably need to install setuptools, and the 
> jhbuild has to be extended to include these.  If I try to fix the 
> #!/usr/bin/python lines, I can probably try to add these at the same 
> time.

The test runner solution make sense to me as long as we can make it 
"just work" (i.e. integrate it with  jhbuild, no fiddling etc).

Marco