External Python packages interfacing beets may want to use an in-memory
beets library instance for testing beets-related code.
The `TestHelper` class is very helpful for this purpose.
Previously `TestHelper` was located in the `test/` directory.
Now it is part of `beets` itself (`beets.test.helper.TestHelper`) and
can be easily imported.
This was a vestige from when we used to need the unittest2 library for pre-2.7
compatibility. Now that we require Python 2.7, we aren't using that library
and this indirection wasn't doing any good.
This reverts commit 9c41c39913.
That commit used byte strings for the `if __name__ == '__main__'` pattern,
which was necessary when we were doing unicode_literals. But it is wrong on
Python 3, and now that we're liberated from unicode_literals, we need to go
back to native strings for this comparison.
Include import of __future__ features division, absolute_imports and
print_function everywhere. Don't add unicode_literals yet for it is
harder to convert.
Goal is smoothing the transition to python 3.
The configuration was not loaded for these tests because they didn't inherit
the common test harness. These failures were hidden on my system because of
some kind of dependency on another test.
In an attempt to finally address the longstanding SQLite locking issues, I'm
introducing a way to explicitly, lexically scope transactions. The Transaction
class is a context manager that always fully fetches after SELECTs and
automatically commits on exit. No direct access to the library is allowed, so
all changes will eventually be committed and all queries will be completed. This
will also provide a debugging mechanism to show where concurrent transactions
are beginning and ending.
To support composition (transaction reentrancy), an internal, per-Library stack
of transactions is maintained. Commits only happen when the outermost
transaction exits. This means that, while it's possible to introduce atomicity
bugs by invoking Library methods outside of a transaction, you can conveniently
call them *without* a currently-active transaction to get a single atomic
action.
Note that this "transaction stack" concepts assumes a single Library object per
thread. Because we need to duplicate Library objects for concurrent access due
to sqlite3 limitation already, this is fine for now. Later, the interface should
provide one transaction stack per thread for shared Library objects.
