Last week was the pytest development sprint located in the beautiful town of Freiburg, Germany. I had been really looking forward to the sprint, and being immediately after the Mozilla all-hands in London I was still buzzing with excitement when I started my journey to Freiburg.
On the first morning I really wasn’t sure about how to get to our sprint venue via public transport, and it didn’t seem to be far to walk from my hotel. It was a lovely sunny morning, and I arrived just in time for the introductions. Having been a pytest user for over five years I was already familiar with Holger, Ronny, and a few others, but this was the first time meeting them. We then spent some time planning out our first day, and coming up with things to work on throughout the week. My first activity was pairing up to work on pytest issues.
For my first task I paired with Daniel to work on an issue he had recently encountered, which I had also needed to workaround in latest versions of pytest. It turned out to be quite a complex issue related to determination of the root directory, which is used for relative reference to test files as well as a number of other things. The fix seemed simple at first – we just needed to exclude arguments that are not paths from consideration for determining the root directory, however there were a number of edge cases that needed resolving. The patch to fix this has not yet landed, but I’m feeling confident that it will be merged soon. When it does, I think we’ll be able to close at least three related issues!
Next, I worked with Bruno on moving a bunch of my plugins to the pytest-dev GitHub organisation. This allows any of the pytest core team to merge fixes to my plugins and means I’m not a blocker for any important bug fixes. I’m still intending on supporting the plugins, but it feels good to have a larger team looking after them if needed. The plugins I moved are pytest-selenium, pytest-html, pytest-variables, and pytest-base-url. Later in the week we also moved pytest-repeat with the approval of the author, who is happy for someone else to maintain the project.
If you’ve never used pytest, then you might expect to be able to simply run pytest on the command line to run your tests. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case, and the reason is that the tool used to be part of a collection of other tools, all with a common prefix of py. so you’d run your tests using the py.test command. I’m pleased to say that I worked with Oliver during the sprint to introduce pytest as the recommended command line entry point for pytest. Don’t worry – the old entry point will still work when 3.0 is released, but we should be able to skip a bunch of confusion for new users!
On Thursday we took a break and took a cable-car up a nearby peak and hiked around for a few hours. I also finally got an opportunity to order a slice of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black Forest gateau), which is named after the area and was a favourite of mine growing up. The break was needed after my brain had been working overtime processing the various talks, demonstrations, and discussions. We still talked a lot about the project, but to be out in the beautiful scenery watching para-gliders gracefully circling made for a great day.
When we returned to our sprint venue on Friday I headed straight into a bug triage with Tom, which ended up mostly focusing on one particular issue. The issue relates to hiding what is at first glance redundant information in the case of a failure, but on closer inspection there are actually many examples where this extra line in the explanation can be very useful.
Unfortunately I had to leave on Saturday morning, which meant I missed out on the final day of the sprint. I have to say that I can’t wait to attend the next one as I had so much fun getting to know everyone, learning some handy phrases in a number of different languages, and commiserating/laughing together in the wake of Brexit! I’m already missing my fellow sprinters!
Nice write up Dave!
Likewise, just saw this now! 🙂