[Python-Dev] Refactoring test.support into a subpackage (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Mon Jul 15 21:54:59 CEST 2013

On 7/15/2013 6:22 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

At the PyCon AU sprints, some of the sprinters worked on a plan Chris Jerdonek and I came up with months ago to convert test.support from a module into a subpackage.

This plan arose from some nasty test suite hacks in the lead up to the release of Python 3.3, where some of the pkgutil tests ended up in test.testrunpy so they could use the package creation infrastructure I have in there without needing to extract a helper module with a release imminent. The scope of the plan covers a few distinct steps: 1. Move Lib/test/support.py to Lib/test/support/init.py (http://bugs.python.org/issue15494) 2. Add a new (documented) test.support.pkghelper submodule with the package creation support code (http://bugs.python.org/issue15403 and http://bugs.python.org/issue15376) 3. Move the pkgutil tests to test.testpkgutil where they belong (http://bugs.python.org/issue15358) 4. Move the existing test.scripthelper and test.bytecodehelper support modules into the test.support subpackage and document them (no issue for that as yet) These changes would be made on both 3.3 and default, to avoid future merge conflicts (note that Indra also posted an updated patch for one pending test suite update to cope with the relocation: http://bugs.python.org/issue15415) My main motivation for doing this is to give a bit more visibility to the helpers that already exist, as well as making them easier to find

Bundling together all the support code I should know about sounds good to me. I only became aware of script_helper, recently, when I saw it imported in a test_xxx file. I still have no idea what it does.

when we want to look into the details of what a test is doing. At the moment, they tend to get lost in the sea of actual test files in the main test directory.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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