Right way to initialize an OrderedDict using its constructor such that it retains order of initial data?

Question

The OrderedDict will preserve any order that it has access to. The only way to pass ordered data to it to initialize is to pass a list (or, more generally, an iterable) of key-value pairs, as in your last two examples. As the documentation you linked to says, the OrderedDict does not have access to any order when you pass in keyword arguments or a dict argument, since any order there is removed before the OrderedDict constructor sees it.

Note that using a list comprehension in your last example doesn't change anything. There's no difference between OrderedDict([(i,i) for i in l]) and OrderedDict([('b', 'b'), ('a', 'a'), ('c', 'c'), ('aa', 'aa')]). The list comprehension is evaluated and creates the list and it is passed in; OrderedDict knows nothing about how it was created.

# An OD is represented by a list of tuples, so would this work?
d = OrderedDict([('b', 2), ('a', 1)])

Yes, that will work. By definition, a list is always ordered the way it is represented. This goes for list-comprehension too, the list generated is in the same way the data was provided (i.e. source from a list it will be deterministic, sourced from a set or dict not so much).

How does one go about verifying if OrderedDict actually maintains an order. Since a dict has an unpredictable order, what if my test vectors luckily has the same initial order as the unpredictable order of a dict?. For example, if instead of d = OrderedDict({'b':2, 'a':1}) I write d = OrderedDict({'a':1, 'b':2}), I can wrongly conclude that the order is preserved. In this case, I found out that a dict is order alphabetically, but that may not be always true. i.e. what's a reliable way to use a counter example to verify if a data structure preserves order or not short of trying test vectors repeatedly until one breaks.

You keep your source list of 2-tuple around for reference, and use that as your test data for your test cases when you do unit tests. Iterate through them and ensure the order is maintained.