Today I finally figured out the solution to a problem I've been trying to solve for a while. It's kind of hacky and maybe a bad idea, but now I know it's possible. The problem has always been that I'd like to test that a function recurses, but not needing it to actually have the recursion execute within to test. Just a unit test to assert that recursion is happening. After a little thought about how Python stores references I came up with this.
So I just spent a couple of hours banging my head on a ridiculous PyMox mocking issue and though I'd share. Here is an example of the existing code.
Anytime I see someone turning an instance method into a property on a Python object, I always have to step back and rethink whether it's really the right thing to do. While properties certain have valid use cases, I often see them overused and misused. This can result in code that is harder to refactor should you decide you actually do want to accept arguments as well as less straight forward to separate in unit tests.
A while back I was working on my podcast client and ran into an issue downloading large files. The root problem was that all of Django's FileField backends store the file (or file-like object) to memory then saves it to disk, and the cubieboard system I was using had limitied memry resources, resulting in "out of memory" errors. After much searching and hacking I finally settled on just storing the file to disk myself using requests streaming argument. This allowed me to download the file in chunks and save directly to disk and then tell the Django field where I placed it, as you can see here.
I'm a big fan of proper unit testing with mocking. So I'm pretty disappointed when we run across a unit that is not only not mocked properly, but results in real-world consequences outside the testing environment. One case we've run into couple of times now is tests that are making actual outbound HTTP requests to remote servers. Since clients don't necessarily like getting fake information posted to their servers every time you run tests, I figured this was a good time to get to the bottom of this.