[OH-Dev] [issue1028] Adjust our "twill tests" to either use Django's test client directly, or use django-webtest

[Asheesh Laroia]

New submission from Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at asheesh.org>:

Right now, we use Twill, a mini fake Python web browser, for some of our tests. 
This is convenient, but has some downsides:

* twill is seemingly unmaintained.

* This is a pretty non-standard thing to do. Therefore, we're likely to run into 
issues that other projects don't run into. (For example, it seems that maybe our 
Twill<->Django integration stopped working, as of Django 1.5? Not sure.)

We use Twill for its browser-like conveniences -- specifically, in the tests, we 
can use a very simple API for filling out web forms and submitting them. 
Luckily, django-webtest <https://github.com/kmike/django-webtest> also provides 
a very clean API that seems to be as expressive as the Twill one.

It'd be great to see someone take this on as a backend refactoring task. I'd be 
very happy to help mentor someone, if they want to do, and could remote pair-
program to some extent on this, too.

References:

* https://djangosnippets.org/snippets/665/

* https://pythonhosted.org/django-test-utils/twill_runner.html

* https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-webtest

* http://twill.idyll.org/

Note that, as of the time of writing, django-webtest is failing one of its unit 
tests. It's not a failure that I think matters for our use, but I wanted to at 
least remark on that to show readers of this OpenHatch but that I'm attentive to 
that sort of thing. (-:

In terms of a process for actually getting this done, here is what I would 
recommend:

* Add django-webtest (and its dependencies) to our dependencies

* Pick the 3 easiest tests of ours that use "tc.go", getting help from me or 
anyone else as needed

And use that experience to answer the question, "Is django-webtest actually 
worth using?" I think the answer will be yes, but by all means let's do a little 
experiment before committing to it.

----------
messages: 4514
nosy: paulproteus
priority: wish
status: unread
title: Adjust our "twill tests" to either use Django's test client directly, or use django-webtest

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