Crash with Python bindings

[Floris Bruynooghe]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg at fifthhorseman.net> writes:

> On Fri 2018-03-16 19:30:37 +0100, Floris Bruynooghe wrote:
>> If someone can hook pytest runs with various python versions into the
>> notmuch test suit I'd be very much obliged and probably have another go
>> at this as it's still an interesting problem and gives a nice way
>> forward.
>
> I don't really know what this request means -- so maybe that means that
> i'm not the right person for the task, which is fine.
>
> but it's also possible that the right person for the task *also* doesn't
> know what you're asking for, so if you could elaborate a bit further
> i think that would be super helpful :)

Fair enough :)
Here a somewhat more long-form version of this:

Before even attempting to refactor the existing bindings to use cffi as
a backend instead off ctypes and/or adding the changes needed to track
the lifetime of objects correctly I would like to be able to write full
unitttest-level tests for the bindings to be able to guarantee that no
user-level APIs are broken.  In my version of the bindings I did this
the traditional Python way: using pytest for writing unittest and using
tox to invoke the tests for the various supported versions of python.

One of the feedback items I got from the patch I sent last time was that
the project would be reluctant to adopt this and would like to avoid
virtualenv and pip with their behaviour of downloading things over the
network.  Instead wishing for it to use a system python which should
have the available tools already installed (i.e. pytest).  And all this
just integrated in the existing test suite.

So my last attempt at this looks like I made a test/T391-pytest.sh file
with the idea of running a subtest for each python version, with the
subtest being a ``pythonX.Y -m pytest bindings/python/tests/`` so it'd
run the entire test.  To be nice this also needs to be hooked up so that
the subtests get skipped when a python version is not available, or is
missing pytest itself.

So while trying to figure this out is where I got distracted last time
and started working more on other things.


Kind Regards,
Floris