Almost all test scripts currently need to override the __init__()
method. When they do that they need to call into super().__init__() as
the base class does some generic initialization.
This commit makes the base class __init__() call into set_test_params()
method. Individual test cases can override set_test_params() to setup
their test parameters.
This commit fixes the module-level docstrings for the tests and helper
modules in qa. Many of these tests were uncommented previously - this
commit ensures that every test case has at least a minimum level of
commenting.
These are text files but their encoding does not depend on the locale.
Not all of them require utf8 but it is better to fix it at something
to remove potential unpredictability.
This is necessary on FreeBSD where no locale is set by default,
and apparently Python defaults not only the terminal encoding to the locale
but that of every text file. So without LOCALE environment it defaults text
file encoding to ASCII. This causes problems with e.g. `bitcoin.conf`.
Luckily the locale doesn't affect the default encoding for str.encode() and
bytes.decode() on Python 3, so this is the only change necessary.
John Newbery