Compress large file

[jdebacker]

This PR addressed Issue #623. It does so by compressing the pickle file used in the test_txfunc.py::test_tax_func_loop unit test using the bz2 package.

Thanks to @chusloj for this suggestion.

[rickecon]

@jdebacker. This looks good to me. Is it ready to go from your end?

[jdebacker]

@rickecon Yes - the test affected still takes to long for Travis CI, so it's still flagged not to run here. But it did pass locally.

But I now see that Travis CI has disappeared here. Shall I include this test in our GH testing suite and see if the GH Action has a timeout limit?

[rickecon]

@jdebacker . Yes. I think we should try to add this test to the GH Action testing and see if it goes through. Testing the tax functions seems like an important check for every PR.

Regarding TravisCI, are you saying that it just stopped working? That is weird. But I guess we're OK to just do our testing through GH Actions.

[chusloj]

see if the GH Action has a timeout limit

@jdebacker I found that the GH timeout limit for a job within a workflow is 6 hours.

[jdebacker]

I found that the GH timeout limit for a job within a workflow is 6 hours.

Wow! That is great. Thanks for letting us know @chusloj.

[jdebacker]

@rickecon There was an issue with running the test_tax_func_loop on GH Actions. The results txfunc.txfunc_est, or any function using it, are dependent on the platform this optimization routine is run on due to differences in the MKL package. So I've added back the full_run flag for this test.

But we should start to add tests to the suite of tests run in our GH Actions now that we are not using Travis CI.

FYI, it looks like Travis CI may still be free for us, but they must have changed something with their API because I noticed that it stopped running on the Cost-of-Captial-Calculator repo last week and OG-USA this week.

[jdebacker]

Looks like the xlrd packages was updated for the first time in a couple years and it broke our tests that read Excel files from the web. To solve, I followed the solution offered here and just pinned the version of the xlrd package.