Somehow I never learned this part correctly: relative imports use the
syntax "import .file" for a file sitting in the same directory.
This error wasn't terribly obvious, but the Pylance linter is yelling at
me so I'll fix it now before anyone else notices.
It's quite hard to get python2 to exit gracefully when the code was
intended for python3, because the interpreter will SyntaxError before
running a single line of code. Thankfully, the pytest developers put a
version check in their .ini config, so that should gracefully handle
both wrong-pytest-version and wrong-python-version.
Also document the woes of trying to run the pytest version shipped by
e.g. Debian or Ubuntu.
Use pytest to manage background services, paths, and environment
variables.
Benefits:
- Tests are a little easier to write.
- Cleanup is more reliable. You can CTRL-C a test and it will still shut
down gracefully. If you manually start a conflicting process, the test
fixtures will detect this and abort at startup.
- Don't need to worry about remembering '--test-threads=1'
- Output of sub-processes can be captured to files.
- Test fixtures configure everything to operate under a single test
output directory, making it easier to capture logs in CI.
- Detects all the necessary paths if run from the git root, but can also
run from arbitrary paths by setting environment variables.
There is also a deliberately broken test (test_broken.py) that can be
used to test whether the test fixtures properly clean up after
themselves. It won't run by default; the comment at the top explains how
to enable it.
