Development and Support

Reporting Issues

Support requests, bugs, issues, documentation typos, and general questions should be submitted via the GitHub Issue Tracker. The issue tracker offers a web interface which allows relevant information to be entered and submitted to the Sorted Containers developers. Steps to file an issue:

  1. Please search the issues database to determine whether the problem has already been reported. It may be that a fix or workaround has already been provided or is soon to be released. If additional information is needed then you are welcome to reopen the issue and comment regarding your specific scenario.

  2. To file a new issue, click the green “New issue” button on the Issue Tracker. You will be required to sign-in to file an issue. It is not possible to submit an issue anonymously.

  3. The issue form has two primary fields: title and comment. The title should be a very short description of the problem; preferably less than ten words. The comment should describe the problem in detail, including what you expected to happen and what instead did happen. Working code samples that illustrate the issue are best.

  4. Submitted issues and comments will notify the lead developer and project maintainers. Bugs are typically fixed very quickly, within a week or so. Feature enhancements may take longer or be deferred until a pull request is made with a working prototype.

Support

Development of Sorted Containers is lead by Grant Jenks <contact@grantjenks.com>. The preferred method of contact for support is to create an issue on the GitHub Issue Tracker. For anything sensitive, such as conduct issues or security issues, please contact the development lead directly by email.

How to Contribute?

Collaborators are welcome!

  1. Check for open issues or open a fresh issue to start a discussion around a bug.

  2. Fork the repository on GitHub and start making your changes to a new branch.

  3. Write a test which shows that the bug was fixed.

  4. Send a pull request and bug the development lead until it gets merged and published :)

Requests for Contributions

  1. Find a way for SortedSet to inherit directly from set.

Get the Code

Sorted Containers is actively developed on GitHub, where the code is open source. The recommended way to get a copy of the source repository is to clone the repository from GitHub:

$ git clone git://github.com/grantjenks/python-sortedcontainers.git

Development Dependencies

Install development dependencies with pip:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

This includes everything for building/running tests, benchmarks and documentation.

Some alternative implementations, such as banyan, may have issues when installing on Windows. You can still develop Sorted Containers without these packages. They will be omitted from benchmarking.

Testing

Testing uses tox. If you don’t want to install all the development requirements, then, after downloading, you can simply run:

$ python setup.py test

The test argument to setup.py will download a minimal testing infrastructure and run the tests.

$ python setup.py test
running test
running egg_info
writing sortedcontainers.egg-info/PKG-INFO
writing dependency_links to sortedcontainers.egg-info/dependency_links.txt
writing top-level names to sortedcontainers.egg-info/top_level.txt
reading manifest file 'sortedcontainers.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
reading manifest template 'MANIFEST.in'
writing manifest file 'sortedcontainers.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
running build_ext
GLOB sdist-make: /Users/grantj/repos/python-sortedcontainers/setup.py
py36 inst-nodeps: /Users/grantj/repos/python-sortedcontainers/.tox/dist/sortedcontainers-1.5.10.zip
py36 installed: attrs==18.1.0,more-itertools==4.1.0,pluggy==0.6.0,py==1.5.3,pytest==3.5.1,six==1.11.0,sortedcontainers==1.5.10
py36 runtests: PYTHONHASHSEED='365015869'
py36 runtests: commands[0] | python -m pytest
================================================= test session starts =================================================
platform darwin -- Python 3.6.5, pytest-3.5.1, py-1.5.3, pluggy-0.6.0
rootdir: /Users/grantj/repos/python-sortedcontainers, inifile: tox.ini
collected 357 items

docs/introduction.rst .                                                                                         [  0%]
sortedcontainers/__init__.py .                                                                                  [  0%]
sortedcontainers/sorteddict.py ...........                                                                      [  3%]
sortedcontainers/sortedlist.py .....................................                                            [ 14%]
sortedcontainers/sortedset.py .................                                                                 [ 18%]
tests/benchmark_splits_fill.py .                                                                                [ 19%]
tests/sortedcollection.py .                                                                                     [ 19%]
tests/test_coverage_sorteddict.py ...................................................                           [ 33%]
tests/test_coverage_sortedkeylist_modulo.py ................................................................... [ 52%]
tests/test_coverage_sortedkeylist_negate.py .......................................................             [ 68%]
tests/test_coverage_sortedlist.py ..........................................................                    [ 84%]
tests/test_coverage_sortedset.py ..................................................                             [ 98%]
tests/test_stress_sorteddict.py ..                                                                              [ 98%]
tests/test_stress_sortedkeylist.py .                                                                            [ 99%]
tests/test_stress_sortedlist.py .                                                                               [ 99%]
tests/test_stress_sortedset.py ..                                                                               [100%]

============================================= 357 passed in 10.86 seconds =============================================
lint inst-nodeps: /Users/grantj/repos/python-sortedcontainers/.tox/dist/sortedcontainers-1.5.10.zip
lint installed: astroid==1.6.4,isort==4.3.4,lazy-object-proxy==1.3.1,mccabe==0.6.1,pylint==1.9.0,six==1.11.0,sortedcontainers==1.5.10,wrapt==1.10.11
lint runtests: PYTHONHASHSEED='365015869'
lint runtests: commands[0] | pylint sortedcontainers
Using config file /Users/grantj/repos/python-sortedcontainers/.pylintrc

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Your code has been rated at 10.00/10 (previous run: 10.00/10, +0.00)

_______________________________________________________ summary _______________________________________________________
  py36: commands succeeded
  lint: commands succeeded

Coverage testing uses pytest-cov:

$ python -m pytest --cov sortedcontainers --cov-report term-missing --cov-branch
================================================= test session starts =================================================
platform darwin -- Python 3.6.5, pytest-3.5.0, py-1.5.3, pluggy-0.6.0
rootdir: /Users/grantj/repos/python-sortedcontainers, inifile: tox.ini
plugins: cov-2.5.1, hypothesis-3.55.3
collected 357 items

docs/introduction.rst .                                                                                         [  0%]
sortedcontainers/__init__.py .                                                                                  [  0%]
sortedcontainers/sorteddict.py ...........                                                                      [  3%]
sortedcontainers/sortedlist.py .....................................                                            [ 14%]
sortedcontainers/sortedset.py .................                                                                 [ 18%]
tests/benchmark_splits_fill.py .                                                                                [ 19%]
tests/sortedcollection.py .                                                                                     [ 19%]
tests/test_coverage_sorteddict.py ...................................................                           [ 33%]
tests/test_coverage_sortedkeylist_modulo.py ................................................................... [ 52%]
tests/test_coverage_sortedkeylist_negate.py .......................................................             [ 68%]
tests/test_coverage_sortedlist.py ..........................................................                    [ 84%]
tests/test_coverage_sortedset.py ..................................................                             [ 98%]
tests/test_stress_sorteddict.py ..                                                                              [ 98%]
tests/test_stress_sortedkeylist.py .                                                                            [ 99%]
tests/test_stress_sortedlist.py .                                                                               [ 99%]
tests/test_stress_sortedset.py ..                                                                               [100%]

---------- coverage: platform darwin, python 3.6.5-final-0 -----------
Name                             Stmts   Miss Branch BrPart  Cover   Missing
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
sortedcontainers/__init__.py        10      0      0      0   100%
sortedcontainers/sorteddict.py     159      0     40      0   100%
sortedcontainers/sortedlist.py    1001      8    420      3    99%   34-39, 44-45, 33->34, 785->787, 1429->1437
sortedcontainers/sortedset.py      179      0     26      0   100%
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOTAL                             1349      8    486      3    99%

It’s normal to see coverage a little less than 100%. Some code is specific to the Python runtime.

Stress testing is also based on pytest but can be run independently as a module. Stress tests are kept in the tests directory and prefixed with test_stress. Stress tests accept two arguments: an iteration count and random seed value. For example, to run stress on the SortedList data type:

$ python -m tests.test_stress_sortedlist 1000 0
Python sys.version_info(major=2, minor=7, micro=0, releaselevel='final', serial=0)
Setting iterations to 1000
Setting seed to 0
Exiting after 0:00:00.846000

If stress exits normally then it worked successfully. Some stress is run by tox and pytest but the iteration count is limited at 1,000. More rigorous testing requires increasing the iteration count to millions. At that level, it’s best to just let it run overnight. Stress testing will stop at the first failure.

Running Benchmarks

Running and plotting benchmarks is a two step process. Each is a Python script in the tests directory. To run the benchmarks for SortedList, plot the results, and save the resulting graphs, run:

$ python -m tests.benchmark_sortedlist --bare > tests/results_sortedlist.txt
$ python -m tests.benchmark_plot tests/results_sortedlist.txt SortedList --save

Each script has a handful of useful arguments. Use --help to display those. Consult the source for details. The file tests/benchmark_plot.py contains notes about benchmarking different Python runtimes against each other.

If you simply want to run the benchmarks to observe the performance on your local machine, then run:

$ curl -OL https://github.com/grantjenks/python-sortedcontainers/zipball/master
$ unzip master
$ cd grantjenks-python-sortedcontainers-[GITHASH]/
$ export PYTHONPATH=`pwd`
$ python -m tests.benchmark_sortedlist
$ python -m tests.benchmark_sorteddict
$ python -m tests.benchmark_sortedset

The benchmarks will warn if some packages are not importable. This limits the possible comparisons. See requirements.txt for the package names than can be installed from PyPI.

Tested Runtimes

Sorted Containers actively tests against the following versions of Python:

  • CPython 2.7

  • CPython 3.2

  • CPython 3.3

  • CPython 3.4

  • CPython 3.5

  • CPython 3.6

  • CPython 3.7

  • PyPy

  • PyPy3

Life will feel much saner if you use venv or virtualenv and tox to manage and test each of the runtimes.