[New-bugs-announce] [issue12581] Increased test coverage of test_urlparse

[Petter Haggholm]

New submission from Petter Haggholm <petter at petterhaggholm.net>:

Some very trivial tests to increase the test coverage on test_urlparse a bit; also changed a single line to use an ABC instead of attempting to use len() to verify that an object is "sequence-like" (as the comment put it). Mostly I’m trying to get my feet wet in submitting a patch in the manner suggested by the guide.

(Curiously, the full test suite coverage report cites 99%, even though the path in question does run: coverage.py fails somehow to mark an else branch consisting of a lone continue statement.)

Looking at this, I have some questions, but figured I might as well ask them along with a patch: First, whether this is appropriate use of ABCs in the library; second, whether it’s appropriate to submit related stuff like modified tests and (lightly) modified code in one patch, or whether I should rather open two issues.

Third, and more generally, I’m wondering whether the tests are appropriate. These are trivial in scope and nature, but I would be interested to know for future reference (and perhaps it would be useful to mention in the docs?) what the policy is on this. Essentially, I encoded expectations of current behaviour as “correct” and covered the 30-odd statements in urllib/parse.py that were not already covered by a full test run (explicit coverage by test_urlparse is still much lower!) on the assumption that, as the coverage guide suggests, more coverage is always better – and even without domain expertise assurance that current behaviour is correct, it at least provides some assurance that changes in behaviour will be discovered. Still, it’s perhaps *too* easy to get hung up on those coverage percentages: Is it *always* better to cover more (keeping in mind the limitations of once-over coverage), or would contributors be better advised not to cover code unless they are very, very confident that current behaviour is correct?

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components: Tests
files: urlparsetest.patch
keywords: patch
messages: 140560
nosy: haggholm
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Increased test coverage of test_urlparse
versions: Python 3.3
Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file22684/urlparsetest.patch

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