HACKING

HACKING
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virtinst is tied closely with libvirt, so it's recommended to try and run
the latest libvirt code if using virtinst from an upstream checkout. See
http://libvirt.org/downloads.html


Please be aware that virtinst is an API. The public classes are marked as
such in virtinst/__init__.py: please be mindful of this when writing patches.
Anything else in the codebase can be editted at will.


The following commands will be useful for anyone writing patches:

    python setup.py test      : Run local unit test suite
    python setup.py pylint    : Run a pylint script against the codebase
    python setup.py test_urls : Test our install media fetching infrastructure
    python setup.py test_cli  : Test various CLI invocations

Any patches shouldn't change the output of 'test' or 'pylint'. Check
requires pyling and python-pep8 to be installed.

Our pylint script uses a blacklist rather than a whitelist approach,
so it could throw some false positives or useless messages. If you think
your patch exposes one of these, bring it up on the mailing list
(virt-tools-list@redhat.com).

If 'python-coverage' is installed, you can run 'coverage -r' after 'test'
to see a code coverage report.

'test_urls' only needs to be run if the patch is against the url fetching
code (virtinst/OSDistro.py). This stuff is notoriously fragile, so running
'test_urls' is a must. If you are debugging a certain url failure, you can
use the --match option to specify specific distros to test.

'test*' have a --debug option if you are hitting problems.