[Python-Dev] Undocumenting test.support in 3.x (was Py3k DeprecationWarning in stdlib) (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Jun 26 17:19:31 CEST 2008

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 7:08 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

Benjamin Peterson wrote:

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 4:00 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

I'm a little worried about making stuff undocumented that every core developer needs to use -- everyone writing tests needs to continue to use testsupport (now test.support?). I imagine people writing unit test suites for 3rd party libraries might want to use its services too. I think undocumented is a little unspecific here. What I mean is "reserved for core Python tests and no promise is made to retain compatibility." Of course, we would keep docs for them (perhaps in Lib/test/README), so new core developers could write their tests. Alternatively, we could just leave them out of the docs table of contents, and stick a big warning at the top saying that these are internal APIs and subject to change without warning between releases. (This discussion actually argues somewhat in favour of having test as the top-level package name for the regression test suite - after all, we make zero promises about keeping the API of any of the test modules the same from release to release, so we should really be using the standard leading underscore convention to flag internal implementation details that are not really intended for use by third parties)

That would also remove the problem users encounter from time to time with module files named "test.py".

But I think we should think about this more. I don't think anyone expects the code inside any particular test_foo.py to have a stable public interface. But quite a bit of the test support infrastructure is reused by third party test frameworks. I think we should acknowledge and support such reuse.

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

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