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

Jean-Paul Calderone exarkun at divmod.com
Wed Aug 13 17:57:36 CEST 2008

On Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:35:15 +0000 (UTC), Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

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)

trial is also an extension of the stdlib unittest module (less and less over time as more and more stdlib unittest changes break it). Incremental improvements with backwards compatibility are a great thing. I very strongly encourage that course of action. It has already happened a number of times in this thread that some proposed functionality already exists in some third-party unittest extension and could easily be moved into the stdlib unittest module. That's a good thing: it shows that the functionality is actually valuable and it makes it easy to include, since it's already implemented.

For what it's worth, trial is MIT licensed; anyone should feel free to grab any part of it they like for any purpose.

Jean-Paul

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