Re: [Gramps-devel] Why is Travis CI unable to import coverage and pyicu?

[Doug B. <dou...@gm...>]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 10:01 AM, John Ralls <jr...@ce...> wrote:

>
> On Aug 17, 2016, at 4:09 AM, Doug Blank <dou...@gm...> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 6:52 AM, Tim Lyons <guy...@gm...> wrote:
>
>> Tim Lyons wrote
>> > I see in the Travis CI report:
>> >
>> >
>> > nose.plugins.cover: ERROR: Coverage not available: unable to import
>> > coverage module
>> >
>> > .gramps.gen.utils.grampslocale.WARNING: ICU not loaded because No
>> module
>> > named PyICU. Localization will be impaired. Use your package manager to
>> > install PyICU
>> >
>> >
>> > Any idea why neither of these modules are imported? Anybody able to fix
>> > this?
>>
>>
>> I have fixed this all in commit
>>
>> https://github.com/gramps-project/gramps/commit/6245d219a93e
>> 9dafa001b8699fc5185f7778c300
>
>
> Much appreciated! That looks like a solid method to move forward. Now,
> coverage reports are updated automatically. We are up to 38.12% (after
> starting at 21.52%). Now we can test the pyicu code as well.
>
> https://codecov.io/gh/gramps-project/gramps
>
> But we have a long way to go on the testing front to reach a reasonable
> 80%. Much of that is GUI code which will need some type of framework (mock,
> something gtk-specific, or framebuffer-based, etc).
>
>
> Automated GUI testing is difficult and generally fragile. IMO there's not
> a lot of point to it outside of the GUI framework itself.
>
> A better approach is to ensure that we strictly comply with MVC separation
> so that the only thing the view code does is call controller functions with
> no manipulation of the results. That makes for what some might consider
> excessive back-and-forth in cases like the date validity checks and
> anything involving GtkTreeView/GtkTreeModel. The benefit is that if there's
> no code worth testing in the GUI directories then we can exclude them from
> the coverage computation and be sure that we really do have good coverage
> of the important code.
>

I agree with this philosophy in general---I meant developing tests that
exercise the logic in the GUI code, not testing the actual GUI itself. But
we can test a lot of logic by instantiating and calling methods in existing
GUI classes, by simply mocking a few gtk methods (such as Window.show).

-Doug


>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>