[Python-Dev] unittest Suggestions (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Wed Aug 13 17:35:15 CEST 2008

Barry Warsaw <barry python.org> writes:

The goal should be to produce something like a unittest-ng, distribute it via the Cheeseshop, and gather consensus around it for possible inclusion in Python 2.7/3.1.

There is already unittest, nose, py.test, trial... perhaps others I don't know of. I fear writing yet another testing framework from the ground-up will lead to more bikeshedding and less focussed discussion (see some testing-in-python threads for an example :-)).

nose itself is not a completely independent piece of work but "a discovery-based unittest extension" (although a very big extension!). For that reason, Michael Foord's suggestion to gradually modernize and improve the stdlib unittest sounds reasonable to me: it allows to be more focussed, keep backwards compatibility, and also to decide and implement changes piecewise - avoiding the blank sheet effect where people all push for wild ideas and radically new concepts (tm).

(however, nose is LGPL-licensed so it would not be suitable for direct reuse of large chunks of code in the stdlib, unless the authors agree for a relicensing)

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