API: add testing functions to public API ? (original) (raw)

A lot of other projects that use pandas will (like to) use pandas testing functionality like assert_frame_equal in their test suite. Although the pandas testing functions are available in the namespace (#6188), they are not really 'officially' labeled as public API that other projects can use (and rely upon).
Numpy has a similar submodule numpy.testing (http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/routines.testing.html)

Some things we could do:

• make a selection of the functions in util.testing that we want to label as public
• add this list somewhere to the docs
• write docstrings for these public ones (the other could use that as well of course ..)
• add some tests for the public API
• I would also import them into a pandas.testing module, so it is this one we can publicly advertise (and users are less tempted to use other non-public functions in the pandas.util.testing namespace)