[QA] Migrate from testr to stestr

Stephen Finucane stephenfin at redhat.com
Wed Feb 10 12:00:22 UTC 2021


On Wed, 2021-02-10 at 08:20 +0000, Sorin Sbarnea wrote:
> While switch from testr to stestr is a no brainer short term move, I want to
> mention the maintenance risks.
> 
> I personally see the stestr test dependency a liability because the project is
> not actively maintained and mainly depends on a single person. It is not
> unmaintained either.
> 
> Due to such risks I preferred to rely on pytest for running tests, as I prefer
> to depend on an ecosystem that has a *big* pool of maintainers.    
> 
> Do not take my remark as a proposal to switch to pytest, is only about risk
> assessment. I am fully aware of how easy is to write impure unittests with
> pytest, but so far I did not regret going this route.

At the risk of starting a tool comparison thread (which isn't my intention),
it's worth noting that much of the reluctance to embrace pytest in the past has
been due to its coupling of both a test runner and a test framework/library in
the same tool. If I recall correctly, this pattern has existed before, in the
form of 'nose', and the fate of that project has cast a long, dark shadow over
similar projects. stestr may be "lightly staffed", but our consistent use of the
unittest framework from stdlib across virtually all projects means we can easily
switch it out for any other test runner than supports this protocol, including
pytest, if we feel the need to in the future. Were pytest to be embraced, there
is a significant concern that its use won't be restricted to merely the test
runner aspect, which leaves us tightly coupled to that tool. You've touched on
this above, but I feel it worth stating again for anyone reading this.

Cheers,
Stephen

> I know that OpenStack historically loved to redo everything in house and
> minimise involvement with other open source python libraries. There are pros
> and cons on each approach but I personally prefer to bet on projects that are
> thriving and that are unlikely to need me to fix framework problems myself.
> 
> Cheers,
> Sorin
> 
> On Tue, 9 Feb 2021 at 17:59, Martin Kopec <mkopec at redhat.com> wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> > 
> > testr unit test runner (testrepository package [1]) hasn't been updated for
> > years, therefore during Shanghai PTG [2] we came up with an initiative to
> > migrate from testr to stestr (testr's successor) [3] unit test runner.
> > Here is an etherpad which tracks the effort [4]. However as there is still
> > quite a number of the projects which haven't migrated, we would like to
> > kindly ask you for your help. If you are a maintainer of a project which is
> > mentioned in the etherpad [4] and it's not crossed out yet, please migrate
> > to stestr.
> > 
> > [1] https://pypi.org/project/testrepository/
> > [2] https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/shanghai-ptg-qa
> > [3] https://pypi.org/project/stestr/
> > [4] https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/enkM4eeDHObSloTjPGAu
> > 
> > Have a nice day,
> > 
> > -- 
> > Martin Kopec 
> > Software Quality Engineer
> > Red Hat EMEA
> > 

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