Our Django web app is the Python 2 code that I'm most concerned about in a world where people are trying to get rid of Python 2, for two reasons. First, not only do we have to worry about Python 2 itself being available but also the Django people have been quite explicit that Django 1.11 is the last version that supports Python 2 and the Django people will stop supporting it in 2020. We probably don't want to be using an unsupported web framework. Second, it's probably the program that's most exposed to character set conversion issues, simply because that seems to be in the nature of things that deal with the web, databases, and so on. In short, we've got to convert it to Python 3 sometime, probably relatively soon, and it's likely to be more challenging than other conversions we've done.

One of the things that would make a Python 3 conversion less challenging is if we had (automated) tests for the app, ideally fairly comprehensive ones. Having solid tests for your code is best practices for a Python 3 conversion for good reasons, and they'd also probably help with things like our Django upgrade pains. Unfortunately we've never had them, which was something I regretted in 2014 and hasn't gotten any better since then, because there's never been a time when adding tests was either a high enough priority or something that I was at all enthused about doing.

(One of my reasons for not feeling enthusiastic is that I suspect that trying to test the current code would lead me to have to do significant revisions on it in order to make it decently testable.)

Looking at our situation, I've wound up feeling that it's time for this to change. Our path forward with the Django app should start with adding tests, which will make both Python 3 and future Django upgrades (including to 1.11 itself) less risky, less work, and less tedious (since right now I do all testing by hand).

(Hopefully adding tests will have other benefits for future development and so on, but some of these are contingent on additional factors beyond the scope of this entry.)

Unfortunately, adding tests to this code is likely to feel like make-work to me, and in a sense it is; the code already works (yes, as far as we know), so all that tests do is confirm that it does. I have no features to add, so I can't add tests to cover the new features as I add them; instead, this is going to have to be just grinding out tests for existing code. Still, I think it needs to be done, and the first step for doing it is for me to learn how to test Django code, starting by reading the documentation.

(This entry is one of the ones that I'm writing in large part as a marker in the ground for myself, to make it more likely that I'll actually carry through on things. This doesn't always work; I still haven't actually studied dpkg and apt, despite declaring I was going to two years ago and having various tabs open on documentation since then. I've even read bits of the documentation from time to time, and then all of the stuff I've read quietly falls out of my mind again. The useful bits of dpkg I've picked up since then have come despite this documentation, not because of it. Generally they come from me having some problem and stumbling over a way to fix it. Unfortunately, our problems with our Django app, while real, are also big and diffuse and not immediate, so it's easy to put them off.)