[Docutils-develop] Recent commit activity

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

Dear Docutils developers, dear Adam,

after a long period of calm, I realize a flurry of commits over the last
couple of days -- far more than I can reasonably review in time.
It is nice to see development activity but also alarming to see it at this
pace, as even a short looking over revealed some pitfalls.

For other changes I would have preferred a discussion or at least some
rationale in the commit messages (not just a one-liner telling what is done).

Changes to the test suite should not only keep the tests running but also
ensure intelligable feedback in case of test failures.
Did you test how the changes affect error reports?

r9135
  tex2unichar.py is a generated file, changes will be lost with an
  update from the database.
       
  (I updated the generating script and prepared a fixup patch.)
       
r9140, r9141: Import ``DocutilsTestSupport`` from ``test``

  This commit breaks the ability to run individual test scripts from
  their respective directories. This is (was) an important help when
  working on the test scripts.

r9145
  Since when is _format_str() unused?
  Does this affect reporting of test failures?
  
r9146
  DocutilsTestSupport must be imported before docutils
  so that imports from docutils use the test-dirs parent directory
  (in case we want to test a not installed Docutils version)
  
r9163
  What happend to sys.stdout.flush()  ?
  
r9165
  compare_output() no longer prints the corresponding input in case of
  assertion errors which makes finding problems in parser test suites
  harder.
  
r9167
  IMV, an encoded string ("bytes" object) is no "binary" output.
  
  I need some more time to understand the changes here.
  
  A StringOutput.encode() method that *decodes* bytes data seems
  odd:
 
  @@ -581,6 +600,11 @@ class StringOutput(Output):
  
  +    def encode(self, data):
  +        if isinstance(data, bytes):
  +            return data.decode(self.encoding, self.error_handler)
  +        return str(data)
  +
  
r9168 Use ``.rstrip()`` instead

  This fails with multi-lined output if line endings in output and extended
  differ.
  
r9178 
  In case we don't want to ship "quicktest.py" with the Docutils
  distribution, we can still keep it in the Docutils repo and simply change:
  
  -can be found in the ``tools/`` directory of the Docutils distribution)
  +can be found in the ``tools/`` directory of the Docutils repository)

r9179, r9180
  there should be a way to avoid this code repetition
  
...


Günter