Make it clearer that mutation happens in-place

As I have never run mutmut before, I left it running in the background while I continued to do some work, and discovered that the mutations happen on the codebase in-place. I think this is totally reasonable, but it didn’t match my assumptions approaching the tool, so I ended up (a) not able to continue working against the codebase, and (b) probably invalidating some of the tests that mutmut performed by writing files while it was running.

It’d be good if this were clearer!

[boxed]

Good luck with that! If the mutants aren’t really testable, we are discussing more advanced whitelisting ideas in https://github.com/boxed/mutmut/issues/47

[pavulon18]

@boxed , Apology accepted. I really appreciate that. I understand about being sleep deprived. I will also apologize for becoming defensive and retaliatory.

Now on to business. I like your idea about changing mutmut apply to mutmut write. I do think that would help give an additional indication that something could be changed.

I also agree that the changes you made in the documentation are much better than the original.

Although I still like my idea of having the extra statement similar to what I wrote above (although I am biased), I think you’ve definitely made some improvements in clarity. I am looking at this from the viewpoint of someone who is an inexperienced programmer and who is still being bombarded with a lot of new concepts. There are times when some points of a new concept are not immediately absorbed. I do concede that you do have (and originally had, as well) a statement that should have caught my eye, but I failed to catch it.

I also have a question about mutmut when used in a project using SQLAlchemy. I’ll pose my question here but if you think this is not the appropriate place for this, please point me in the right direction.

Should the classes that are used for mapping SQL tables be mutation tested? and if so, how do I go about fixing my classes to kill the mutations? I can supply specific examples of code that I am talking about, if need be.

I have not seen anything online that addresses this issue. These questions could simply be due to my lack of experience.

EDIT: After writing this earlier, I have figured a way to test at least some of the functions in my SQLAlchemy classes that I was confused about. I’ll try to build on this to see if I can get most, if not all of them testable.