568998 - separate mozmill and restart into different files

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Testing Graveyard :: Mozmill, defect)

Description

[Heather Arthur [:harth]]

Whenever I work on Mozmill, I'm always accidentally editing methods in MozMillRestart class instead of MozmMill or vice versa because they're so similar, we should separate these, and put them in different files, importing both from __init__.py

Comment 1

[Heather Arthur [:harth]]

branch with separated files: http://github.com/harthur/mozmill/tree/seperate-restart

Comment 2

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Jeff, does it work for you? Given your own work we will end-up in 4 different files, is that correct?

mozmill.py
restart.py
mozmill-cli.py (or similar)
restart-cli.py (or similar)

Comment 3

[Jeff Hammel]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Jeff, does it work for you? Given your own work we will end-up in 4 different
> files, is that correct?
> 
> mozmill.py
> restart.py
> mozmill-cli.py (or similar)
> restart-cli.py (or similar)

I would like a level of separation with at least one more file, e.g.

mozmill.py
restart.py
firefox_cli.py
firefox_restart_cli.py
thunderbird_cli.py

I don't really care about the names, but it's important to use underscores instead of dashes, as the latter will be a python syntax error when trying to import them (in general, dashes should be avoided for python scripts, except generated command line entry-points).

Having each command-line interface in a separate file allows the scripts to be easily run packaged or unpackaged.  I.e. each file has a `main` function (or whatever, we call it cli and variations thereof here) and you have a shebang at the top `#!/usr/bin/env python` and at the bottom you have 

if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

Since it is unknown going forward whether mozmill will be run packaged (e.g. after running setup.py and invoking setuptools) or unpackaged (via running, e.g. `python mozmill_cli.py`), separation give us (and everyone else) the freedom to run unpackaged.  We also use local references to find resources (e.g. os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))) vs setuptools pkg_resources.  Normally, I would call this undesirable (as, for reasons I don't understand, people like to install packages in zipped eggs...never understood why, and our method won't work there), but it does allow us to run unpackaged so in this case I'm for it.  The only barrier is having one file per command line script.

Comment 5

[Jeff Hammel]

possibly worth seeing the patch on duplicae bug 562473

Comment 6

[cmtalbert]

once bug 584464 lands, this is no longer an issue.

--> WONTFIX