python-csp update #1

[Sarah Mount]

Hi everyone, 

This project been dormant for a while but I am in the process of resurrecting it on GitHub. This is progress from the past couple of weeks, mostly infrastructure changes and efforts to update the dev workflow, rather than changes to the code:

* Sphinx documentation has been re-styled. The tutorial which was on the Google Code wiki has been integrated into the main docs. There is quite a bit more to do here, but now everything is in one place it should be easier to finish it all off. The current documentation can be found here:  http://python-csp.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ 

* The idiosyncratic tests in the test/ directory have been moved to csp/test/. The intention is to refactor these to use the py.test framework rather than the hand-rolled tests in current use. As a result, the new_tests branch which made a start on this work will soon be closed. There are some interesting challenges in testing a library like this. For example, we want to check that Par(...).start() really does run several processes in parallel and that results of parallel execution are more likely than not to be interleaved. This isn't as simple as testing a single function with a numeric return value! These efforts to refactor the tests are currently blocked. It turns out that the decorators used in the python-csp library interfere with the py.test library. A discussion of this issue (with minimum code to reproduce) can be found on the py.test mailing list here: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/pytest-dev/2014-January/002458.html 

* Continuous integration is now provided by travis-ci, you can see the current build status here: https://travis-ci.org/snim2/python-csp/ Right now the build status is "Errored" due to the issue with py.test described above. When the testing issues have been resolved I'll set up a travis-ci for the code in python-concurrency/python-csp also.

* python2 and python3 versions of the code are now both supported in master. The 2to3 tool has been run over all the code in the "3" directories. Consequently the python3 branch which started this work has been merged into master. 

* Some unfinished code has been moved out of the master branch. Extraneous documentation such as IRC logs, papers, talks, etc. have been moved to python-concurrency/extradocs which can be found here https://github.com/python-concurrency/extradocs

These changes can be found in my GitHub fork snim2/python-csp. I will push them to python-concurrency/python-csp when the testing issues have been resolved. 

Next step - refactoring the core library to be more pythonic; improved benchmarks and merging the posix branch into master.

Feel free to suggest changes, raise issues, start flame wars ...

Cheers,

Sarah

--
Sarah Mount, Senior Lecturer, University of Wolverhampton
website:  http://www.snim2.org/
twitter: @snim2