WIP: RPC Tests Improvement List

[zancas]

This issue is currently a scratch pad for collecting ideas/observations related to RPC tests.

Codecs:

• a well defined single transformer between Decimal and struct?
• test_framework, _response or get_response, should deserialize:
  * some field to bytes
  * some to Decimal
• check for lurking floats

Possible Duplicated Functionality:

• e.g. in initialize_chain and start_node
• make classes use proper constructors where relevant

Compare Py3 implementation with bitcoin core

Efficiency:

• how often is it necessary to run e.g. "initiate_chain"? Could test run time be cut... by a constant factor?

Etc:

• Is it necessary to call mininode operations during a test? Perhaps use mininode to precompute test vectors, and then store them in explicit form.
• generate coverage data from a test run, is there dead code in the test code base?
• increase granularity of tests
• use standard assertion checking (pytest)
• type hints?
• unit tests?
• implement components in Rust (e.g. mininode.rs)?

Enhancements:

• run against bitcoin
• run against zebrad
• run against YEC

Code Quality:

• BitcoinTestFramework should inherit from unittest.Testcase
• order tests by time
• coverage of test code, do we have dead code?

[zancas]

What about the 2638 lines of Python that aren't in the qa directory, and aren't generated by the build process?

/home/ghurder/freshzcash: 0 $
cloc --exclude-dir qa --include-lang Python .
    1191 text files.
    1176 unique files.
    1172 files ignored.

github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.82  T=0.09 s (240.3 files/s, 37452.9 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Python                          22            467            324           2638
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                            22            467            324           2638
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[zancas]

/home/ghurder/freshzcash: 0 $
for i in `ls -1`; do PYLINES=`cloc --include-lang Python $i | grep Python | awk '{print $NF}'`; if [ "$PYLINES" != "" ]; then echo $PYLINES $i; fi done
1656 contrib
11411 qa
299 src
683 zcutil

[Eirik0]

Hey! Thanks for putting this together. We will look in to this when we look in to the py2->py3 migration.

[zancas]

Obsolete.