[pytest-dev] (new) pytest plugins / note to plugin authors

[holger krekel]

Hi Bruno,

On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 21:44 -0300, Bruno Oliveira wrote:
> Hi Holger,
> 
> I've played around a bit with PyPi's api.
> 
> Obtaining the meta data is easy enough, but I found that only 7 out of 60
> of the packages (searching for "pytest-") have a tox.ini file. Even thought
> it is just a few, I think we can use that initially especially if that
> encourages more plugin authors to use tox to manage its test runs.

We could think about generating a tox.ini which runs "py.test -h" afterwards
and thus verifies that the plugin installs, at least.

> I'm thinking of putting a script that can generate Sphinx docs from live
> PyPi package information, and later on be also able to test plugins
> compatibility. I'm thinking to provide a patch to pytest's own
> documentation, but later on we can move this to a live app that
> periodically fetches that information to keep it up to date if you think it
> is necessary. How does that sound?

A script that generates sphinx-doc(s) makes sense.  Maybe to finally
produce content at http://pytest.org/latest/plugins/ or so and we make
a direct navigation link to its index page.

If you have an entry point into that script that allows to re-check a
particular project we could think about calling that triggered by the PyPI 
changelog API (i can do that part as i have been working with this stuff
a lot in the devpi.net project), or other events like preparing a new
pytest release.

As this script will -- when installing or testing -- execute almost
arbitrary code released to pypi i think we should have a human-screened
"whitelist" of projects we inspect/try in this manner.  

I'll give you commit rights to the pytest repo once the initial script
produces something.

cheers and thanks for the thoughts and efforts!

holger