Make batchrunner's "variable parameters" optional.

[ihopethiswillfi]

Fixes #466

[coveralls]

Coverage decreased (-0.6%) to 80.594% when pulling 5a56c11 on ihopethiswillfi:master into 8ff0f7d on projectmesa:master.

[ihopethiswillfi]

Can anyone help write a test? I looked at it for a while but wasn't sure how to best approach it. I haven't written tests before :)

I was thinking to just copy the function at the bottom of test_batchrunner.py and set
self.variable_params = {}

Also I don't understand why the function test_model_with_fixed_parameters_as_kwargs doesn't seem to cover this. It seems to launch a batchrunner WITH fixed_params and WITHOUT variable_params , which is what we need to test.

[dmasad]

It's generally not a good practice to use a mutable value (e.g. {}) as a default argument. In this case I don't think anything harmful would happen, but I'd suggest leaving None as the default value just in case, and for general Pythonic-ness. Then you can add something like if not variable_parameters: variable_parameters = {}

[dmasad]

It's been a while since I've looked at the test code, but it looks like in test_model_with_fixed_parameters_as_kwargs, the variable_parameters are still the default self.variable_params values set in the test default. To test not having any explicitly, you'd need to set self.variable_params = None.

[jackiekazil]

@dmasad -- can you remind me / us where this left off? other than fixing conflicts? (I can't remember what as the explicit ask on this.)

[ihopethiswillfi]

This is 'fixed' but the new code isn't covered by any tests. Unfortunately I haven't had the time to look into that and I don't think I'll have time in upcoming weeks either.

Also the variable_parameters={} should be taken care of as Dmasad already mentioned, which should be very simple to do.

[dmasad]

Turns out this is slightly more complicated than expected because BatchRunnerMP also needs to be updated to work with this. I'm working on it.

[dmasad]

Closing; superseded by #596