Quote

I read git magic today and found a link to the original thread on LKML. One of neat quotes in there is a line from Linus' post dated 8th of April 2005:

"git" is really trivial, written in four days. Most of that was not actually spent coding, but thinking about the data structures.

Generic constructor assertion

It is quite common to write such initializers:

class Foo(object):
    def __init__(self, a, b):
        self.a = a
        self.b = b

Why not test it in a generic way?

import inspect

def assert_simple_constructor(klass):
    allargs = inspect.getargspec(klass.__init__)[0]
    args = allargs[1:] # skipping self
    instance = klass(*args)
    for argname in args:
        assert hasattr(instance, argname) # skipped the message
        assert getattr(instance, argname) == argname # to keep short