HACKING.rst

Nova Client Style Commandments

• Step 1: Read the OpenStack Style Commandments http://docs.openstack.org/developer/hacking
• Step 2: Read on

Nova Client Specific Commandments

None so far

Text encoding

• All text within python code should be of type 'unicode'.

  WRONG:

  >>> s = 'foo'
  >>> s
  'foo'
  >>> type(s)
  <type 'str'>

  RIGHT:

  >>> u = u'foo'
  >>> u
  u'foo'
  >>> type(u)
  <type 'unicode'>

• Transitions between internal unicode and external strings should always be immediately and explicitly encoded or decoded.

• All external text that is not explicitly encoded (database storage, commandline arguments, etc.) should be presumed to be encoded as utf-8.

  WRONG:

  mystring = infile.readline() myreturnstring = do_some_magic_with(mystring) outfile.write(myreturnstring)

  RIGHT:

  mystring = infile.readline() mytext = s.decode('utf-8') returntext = do_some_magic_with(mytext) returnstring = returntext.encode('utf-8') outfile.write(returnstring)

Running Tests

The testing system is based on a combination of tox and testr. If you just want to run the whole suite, run tox and all will be fine. However, if you'd like to dig in a bit more, you might want to learn some things about testr itself. A basic walkthrough for OpenStack can be found at http://wiki.openstack.org/testr