Hi Arnaud,

On Jun 07, 2011, at 11:55 AM, arnaud.le-roy@voila.fr wrote:

I've just installed mailman 3 : as my goal is to use it with the REST interface or custom scripts, I'd like to get a good grasp of how it is working. So, I'm trying to use it in interactive mode as in the package documentation. However, I'm not sure of the best way to be in the same context as in the documentation examples. At first I tried the "py" script under bin, but everything is not initialised (eg I have component not found errors for getUtility). Then I tried with mailman withlist. It works better now but I now see the dump_list function in the examples and I had to import it manually. So my question is : what is the context of the examples and how can I set it up ? Or are they all "ad hoc" with no general way to be in the same state ?

You're pretty close, actually. The documentation does assume a slightly crafted global namespace, which you can see in src/mailman/tests/test_documentation.py. Look in the setup() function. I've tried to keep these 'magic test gobals' to a minimum, but some are just too darn convenient.

You're right that bin/py does not initialize the system. That's exactly what bin/mailman withlist does though. As you've seen, you will have to manually import certain names though, exactly the ones that test_documentation.py puts in the doctest globals. It should be fairly obvious from looking at that file what you'll need and where to get it from.

The other tricky bit about the test suite is that you might need to take into account the "layer" feature of zope.testing. You'll find all the testing layers in src/mailman/testing/layers.py and for doctests, some package __init__.py files have a layer global that defines the layer for doctests in that package. See for example src/mailman/rest/docs/__init__.py.

I hope that helps. -Barry