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

Ethan Furman ethan at stoneleaf.us
Thu Aug 4 01:00:52 CEST 2011

Michael Foord wrote:

On 3 Aug 2011, at 22:58, Ethan Furman wrote:

Michael Foord wrote:

On 3 Aug 2011, at 21:36, Ethan Furman wrote:

My apologies for posting here first, but I'm not yet confident enough in my bug searching fu, and duplicates are a pain.

Here's the issue: from unittest import *

That's the bug right there. Just import TestCase and main and everything should work fine. Using "import *" is not recommended except at the interactive interpreter and it doesn't play well with unittest.main which does magic introspection to find tests to run.

If from xxx import * is not supported, why provide all? a) to define the public API

In trying to refute this, I found http://docs.python.org/py3k/reference/simple_stmts.html?highlight=all#the-import-statement and learned something new. Thanks, Michael!

I think I'll withdraw my bug report, however -- since from ... import * is already noted as usually bad practice it should fall on the shoulders of the modules where it is /supposed/ to work to advertise that, and absent any such advertisement it should not be used.

Ethan

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