CI/CD Improvements, ToDos, and Wishlist

[juarezr]

Overview

The CI/CD is a fundamental piece for assuring petl quality and avoiding regressions.

It helps us with the following boring tasks:

• Testing Pull Requests before merging into master branch:
  • Testing from python 2.7 up to 3.10
  • Assuring line coverage does not regress
  • Testing integrations with other libs as:
  • fsspec for reading/writing to/from remote filesystems like network drives and cloud-scale buckets/filesystems
  • SQLAlchemy for reading/writing to/from Databases
  • Many file formats like: xls, avro, bcolz, etc..
  • Making releases to:
  • PyPI
  • Conda Forge
  • readthedocs.org

Status

These tests are executed with success in Github Actions:

python	pytest	doctests	formats	database	remote	sphinx	library	failure
2.7	all	none
3.6	all	mac/linux	mac/linux	linux
3.7	all	mac/linux	mac/linux	linux			bcolz
3.8	all	mac/linux	mac/linux	linux	linux	linux	bcolz
3.9	all	mac/linux	mac/linux	linux			bcolz
3.10	all	mac/linux	mac/linux					numpy

Improvements

Topics thas worth exploring and evolving to enhance testing experience:

• Expand the coverage test kinds in more python versions and OS.
• Run more kinds of tests on Windows if possible: doctests, formats, database, remote
• Use tox in CI instead of directly calling pytest for ensuring that local testing behaves as in CI
• Remove unused tests clutter in tox.ini
• Create a docker-compose for provisioning database and filesystem for testing on local computer and CI
• Explore more ideas for assuring we can catch regressions.
• Discontinue AppVeyor as similar Windows testing is available in Github Actions
• Make doctests generate example.* files in a temp folder instead of git clone root.

Problems

• Windows only executes pytest with basic python/petl tests
• The release CD was running on travis-ci.org which was discontinued.