[Python-Dev] built-in Python test runner (was: Python Language Summit at PyCon: Agenda) (original) (raw)

Robert Collins robertc at robertcollins.net
Tue Mar 5 08:13:02 CET 2013

On 5 March 2013 20:02, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 1:41 AM, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:

So that is interesting, but its not sufficient to meet the automation need Barry is calling out, unless all test suites can be run by 'python -m unittest discover' with no additional parameters [and a pretty large subset cannot]. But can they be changed so they are? That's gotta be the important bit.

In principle maybe. Need to talk with the trial developers, nose developers, py.test developers etc - to get consensus on a number of internal API friction points.

What's needed here is not a tool that can run all unittests in existence, but an official way for automated tools to run tests, with the ability for any test and test framework to hook into that, so that you can run any test suite automatically from an automated tool. The, once that mechanism has been identified/implemented, we need to tell everybody to do this.

I think the command line is the right place to do that - declare as metadata the command line to run a packages tests.

I don't care much what that mechanism is, but I think the easiest way to get there is to tell people to extend distutils with a test command (or use Distribute) and perhaps add such a command in 3.4 that will do the unittest discover thingy. I remember looking into zope.testrunner hooking into that mechanism as well, but I don't remember what the outcome was.

Agreed.

-Rob

-- Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com> Distinguished Technologist HP Cloud Services

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