[Python-Dev] unittest's redundant assertions: asserts vs. failIf/Unlesses (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Apr 8 02:37:54 CEST 2008

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 5:16 PM, Jeffrey Yasskin <jyasskin at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 2:15 PM, <glyph at divmod.com> wrote: > > On 02:21 pm, murman at gmail.com wrote: > >>OTOH, I'd rather there be OOWTDI so whatever the consensus is is fine > >>with me. > > > >This strikes me as a gratuitous API change of the kind Guido was > >warning about in his recent post: "Don't change your APIs incompatibly > >when porting to Py3k" > > I agree emphatically. Actually I think this is the most extreme case. > The unit test stuff should be as stable as humanly possible between 2 > and 3, moreso than any other library.

This is convincing for me. Move my +1 back to 3.1.

Same here; let's tread carefully here and not change this with 3.0. Starting to deprecate in 3.1 and killing in 3.3 would be soon enough. I like using only the assertKeyword variants, removing assert_, fail*, and assertEquals. However I don't like changing assertTrue and assertFalse to insist that the value is exactly True or False -- if you really care that much, let's add assertIs(x, y) which asserts that x and y are the same object. I also think that all tests should use the operator their name implies, e.g. assertEqual(x, y) should do something like

if x == y: pass else: raise AssertionError(...)

rather than

if x != y: raise AssertionError(...)

Someone please open a bug for this task.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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