#3052 is failing CI for multiple reasons. One of them is errors during pylint testing, presumably due to the pylint version on the Action being incremented. Here I have addressed those issues on master, as well as some other Errors that pylint raised on my own system when checking master.

Some changes are due to warnings about reading from uninitialised variables, which arise due to using a "elif variable == 'string'" substitute-for-switch pattern that is not guaranteed to be exhaustive from the perspective of the linter. I tend to prefer to keep that pattern rather than using an "else:" for the last option as it's more robust to future augmentation.

I have not addressed the warning about distutils being deprecated.

On my local system I also get a lot of these, will wait to see if GitHub complains about it also:

pylint: Command line or configuration file:1: UserWarning: 'Exception' is not a proper value for the 'overgeneral-exceptions' option. Use fully qualified name (maybe 'builtins.Exception' ?) instead. This will cease to be checked at runtime when the configuration upgrader is released.
************* Module testing/pylint.rc
testing/pylint.rc:1:0: E0015: Unrecognized option found: argument-name-hint, attr-name-hint, class-attribute-name-hint, class-name-hint, const-name-hint, function-name-hint, inlinevar-name-hint, method-name-hint, module-name-hint, variable-name-hint, no-space-check (unrecognized-option)