Hi list,

I have been working on making pycurl Python 3-compatible. In the
process of doing that I realized that I needed tests that did not exist
(e.g., I could not find a test that simply made a GET request with
nothing else). Therefore I had to start writing a test suite in a
unittest-ish format.

That is when the question of what the test suite could use, and
subsequently depend on, came up. As pycurl is an http client, an http
server is needed to test pycurl against it. Implementing such an http
server and managing its lifetime in the tests requires greatly varying
amounts of effort depending on which libraries are used.

1. Python standard library only: server is SimpleHTTPServer based, is
started and stopped in setUp/tearDown methods for each test method.
This option requires no dependencies, but is most laborious and also
slowest due to repeated setup/teardown.

2. Use nose (https://nose.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) for running
tests. This in particular allows for module-level setup and teardown
code, which means the http server will be started and stopped once per
test module rather than once per test method.

3. Use a framework for writing the http server to test pycurl against.
I have had good results with bottle (http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/).
This dramatically reduces the time needed to write the http server.

4. Use an existing test http server. I only came across these recently,
but https://github.com/Lispython/httphq looks like a fairly
comprehensive implementation. The upside is pycurl does not need to
implement its own test server. The downside is the test http server may
do more than pycurl needs and have further dependencies of its own. In
particular, httphq requires tornado from what I see.

5. Use an existing test http service (i.e. software from #4 hosted by
someone on the Internet). I am including this for completeness, but I
believe that offline development is essential and thus requiring an
Internet connection to run the test suite is a no-go.

Thoughts?

Oleg
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Received on 2013-03-01