This patch does minor style cleanups to the code in the python and
tests directory. There's other code floating around that could use
similar treatment, but updating it is not convenient at the moment.
Until now, the Python bindings for OVSDB have not supported writing to the
database. Instead, writes had to be done with "ovs-vsctl" subprocesses.
This commit adds write support and brings the Python bindings in line with
the C bindings.
This commit deletes the Python-specific IDL tests in favor of using the
same tests as the C version of the IDL, which now pass with both
implementations.
This commit updates the two users of the Python IDL to use the new write
support. I tested this updates only by writing unit tests for them,
which appear in upcoming commits.
OVS has two Python tests that have always failed, for reasons not
understood, since they were added to the tree. This commit fixes them.
One problem was that Python was assuming that stdout was encoded in ASCII.
Apparently the only way to "fix" this at runtime is to set PYTHONIOENCODING
to utf_8 in the environment, so this change does that.
Second, it appears that Python really doesn't like to print invalid UTF-8,
so this avoids doing that in python/ovs/json.py, instead just printing
the hexadecimal values of the invalid bytes. For consistency, it makes
the same change to the C version.
Third, the C version of test-ovsdb doesn't check UTF-8 for consistency, it
just sends it blindly to the OVSDB server, but Python does check it and so
it bails out earlier. This commit changes the Python version of the
"no invalid UTF-8 sequences in strings" to allow for the slight difference
in output that occurs for that reason.
Finally, test-ovsdb.py needs to convert error messages to Unicode
explicitly before printing them in the "parse-atoms" function. I don't
really understand why, but now it works.
These initial bindings pass a few hundred of the corresponding tests
for C implementations of various bits of the Open vSwitch library API.
The poorest part of them is actually the Python IDL interface in
ovs.db.idl, which has not received enough attention yet. It appears
to work, but it doesn't yet support writes (transactions) and it is
difficult to use. I hope to improve it as it becomes clear what
semantics Python applications actually want from an IDL.
