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Video introduction the codebase

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[–] onlinepersona 12 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Oh my... I'll eat my words about python maintainability. No unit tests, no emulation tests (with emulated services), no tests with a database, no formatter, no linter, no type hints, simple pip... The result is working, but I'm a little bit concerned about the nigh complete lack of testing and though they use an ORM (SQLAlchemy), I find the raw SQL therein (even if it's simple) concerning.

Besides that, the end result looks quite usable and it's nice to see an alternative to lemmy.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 5 points 17 hours ago

Yeah the lack of test suites really kicks our arse sometimes. I changed it from hard-deleting to soft-deleting stuff recently, and I forgot to check whether a post actually links to an external URL when restoring a post. The first time someone restored a post without one, it decided that it now had 189 cross-posts (i.e. all the other text posts that week). Whoops!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Yep, this Python-based project has no tests but not because it's written in Python, lol

[–] onlinepersona 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Attempting to get something working first and possibly adding tests later? Or are there other reasons?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Pretty much.

It's a hobby project so we work on things we find fun or interesting. To me, tests are neither of those.

[–] onlinepersona 1 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

😄 understandable. Are you open to one or more of the things I mentioned being added? Strict type checking, tests, formatter, linting?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

BTW I recently added the database structure for post licenses and have PeerTube video licence information being saved into the DB when they federate to us. However there is no UI that will let people specify a license for their PieFed posts or comments. The UI needs to present a list of licenses to choose from and reading about all the different ones made my eyes glaze over.

You might like to start there as it seems to be an interest of yours!

[–] onlinepersona 1 points 1 hour ago

I feel like I'm getting nerd-sniped 😄 Believe it or not, writing tests, adding type hints, adding a formatter and linting, are actually more interesting to me than UI-work 😇

I'll see if I can make some time this week, but no guarantees!

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Yes we could really do with all of those. Patches welcome. Other than a preference for PEP 8 I don't have strong opinions about particular linters or formatters.

I see the benefits of types but am not puritanical about it. I'm ok with the way we're using types at the moment. Most utility functions have types specified, especially those that return database objects so the type information flows up to the routes pretty well. I mostly see it as a way to help my IDE autocomplete work better than as a holy grail. I'm sure there are places where more types could be added but making it a policy that every function must have a type signature seems OTT.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 19 hours ago

As a user, the lemmy API backend is pretty fuckin fast. The default web frontend however is a slug.

Using lemmy with a third party app like voyager is super snappy.