What is the proper way to test that a schema is not empty?

[gitgrift]

This is a naive question but I have not found any other discussion about it.

I have learned from https://json-schema.org/understanding-json-schema/basics that an empty schema is a valid one. And so jsonschema.validate() does not raise an exception if you pass in an empty value for schema. That's fine, as it is easy enough to first test if the schema argument value is empty or.

But jsonschema.validate() also seems to accept a non-empty schema value that does not contain any useful schema keywords. So when I call jsonschema.validate() how can I be certain that the schema describes some specific properties of an instance?

Afaict the validator check_schema methods ignore unrecognized keywords so a schema full of garbage is no different than an empty one.

[Julian]

The behavior you're describing is the behavior mandated by the JSON Schema spec, which allows unknown keywords in all existing versions, though which will likely disallow them in upcoming ones.

The basic general answer is "have tests which exercise your schema" if you're trying to catch bugs in it.