[Jeremy Hylton]
I just closed the bug report quoted below with the following response:
I don't agree that unit tests should run automatically. Nor do I think adding magic to the language to support unit tests is necessary when it is trivial to add some external mechanism.
I guess this topic could be opened up for discussion if someone else disagrees with me. Regardless, though, it's too late for 2.1.
Justin had earlier brought this up on Python-Help. I'll attach a nice PDF doc he sent with more detail than the bug report. I had asked him to consider a PEP and have a public debate first; don't know why he filed a bug report instead; I recall I got more email about this, but it's so far down the stack now I'm not sure I'll ever find it again <sigh>. FWIW, I don't believe we should make this magical either, and there are practical problems that were overlooked; e.g., when Lib/ is on a read-only filesystem, Python *always* recompiles the libraries upon import. Not insurmountable, but again points out the need for open debate first. Justin, take it up on comp.lang.python.