Completing our Plasma factory implementation

As we all (probably) know now, our Plasma factory implementation got finished much sooner than expected. So, I’ve been mostly lurking around since my last blog post adding features in our plasma pie, discovering bugs under our plasma bed, reviewing plasma requests, gazing at stars made of plasma, etc.

I’ll talk about some of the progress that’s being made in PlasmaPy. I made a PR (#483) that allows us to pass collections to our particle_input decorator. This was my first time working with decorators in real world programming. It seems like it turned out pretty well. Oh and #493 was cute.

I also moved around tests for our plasma subclasses (#489). One thing I noticed during this PR that it is important to have __init__.py in each of your directory, otherwise any tests in directories without __init__.py are not going to be picked up with ./setup.py test! However, they seem to work when using pytest directly though. I found a similar problem with #494 which shot up our coverage from 93.18% and 95.38%. It is pretty surprising, a single empty __init__.py can do wonders. So, if anyone is reading this uses ./setup.py test in their projects right now, you better take care of such stuff in your codebase. You really don’t want to be writing tests only to realize it later on that they aren’t even being executed.

Also, we recently shifted to CodeCov instead of Coveralls. Why? No big reason except CodeCov apparently has a greater userbase. and some minor differences can be found here.

We are currently fighting with coveragerc configuration file not being picked up by coverage, which is a code coverage measurement in tool for Python. (#495, #496, #497). So, some stuff like # coveralls: ignore does not get respected and coverage marks these lines in red (meaning that they aren’t covered) instead of just leaving them whitish (ignoring them).

We could replace # coveralls: ignore with # pragma: no cover since that is the default for coverage and it works with CodeCov integration (ritiek/PlasmaPy#3), but this might leave other future additions to coveragerc file still a problem if it isn’t going to be picked up by coverage. There is a workaround that seems to be sort of working (ritiek/PlasmaPy#4, do notice it further shoots up our coverage from 95.38% to 96.69%!) and is probably bit ugly but should hopefully suffice for the moment if we can’t find a better solution.

The next little bit related to GSoC is that I expect to create a Plasma subclass which reads HDF5 files that are based upon OpenPMD format using h5py python module and then expose relevant attributes of information. I suspect it isn’t going to be a big task but we’ll get to shed light on further details once we see this little bit happen in PlasmaPy.

OK that would be all for now. Happy plasma pie baking, bye!