This is a bug fix release, fixing a number of problems with the settings system:
- Test functions defined using @given can now be called from other threads (Issue #337)
- Attempting to delete a settings property would previously have silently done the wrong thing. Now it raises an AttributeError.
- Creating a settings object with a custom database_file parameter was silently getting ignored and the default was being used instead. Now it’s not.
Notes
For historic reasons, _settings.py had been excluded from the requirement to have 100% branch coverage. Issue #337 would have been caught by a coverage requirement: the code in question simply couldn’t have worked, but it was not covered by any tests, so it slipped through.
As part of the general principle that bugs shouldn’t just be fixed without addressing the reason why the bug slipped through in the first place, I decided to impose the coverage requirements on _settings.py as well, which is how the other two bugs were found. Both of these had code that was never run during tests - in the case of the deletion bug there was a __delete__ descriptor method that was never being run, and in the case of the database_file one there was a check later that could never fire because the internal _database field was always being set in __init__.
I feel like this experiment thoroughly validated that 100% coverage is a useful thing to aim for. Unfortunately it also pointed out that the settings system is much more complicated than it needs to be. I’m unsure what to do about that - some of its functionality is a bit too baked into the public API to lightly change, and I’m don’t think it’s worth breaking that just to simplify the code.