The Testsuite and Python 3

Just like that the year is now 2022 (how long will we all forget and write 2021 on things?) and Asterisk 20 work continues! I say Asterisk 20 work but there’s really many things, not directly for the Asterisk release, that occur as well. We triage issues, do code reviews, and take care of the project infrastructure. To that end I’d like to shine a light on an aspect of the project that would be great to see some community involvement in: the testsuite!

The testsuite is what has allowed us to immensely increase the stability of Asterisk, uncover issues before they get released, and made us much more comfortable with changes. It’s very much a foundational aspect of the project even if at times we dislike writing tests for it.

When the testsuite was originally written it was done against Python 2. As we all know things have moved on and Python 3 is where projects need to move to, including the testsuite. While moving the testsuite to Python 3 is not an overwhelmingly large project it is still a decent amount of work.

If you are familiar with Python and would be interested in helping with this effort I urge you to reach out to the asterisk-dev mailing list or contribute changes. Maintaining compatibility with Python 2 is needed during the transition so we can continue to test Asterisk as changes go in.

Thanks and happy new year, everyone!

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