[AstroPy] Testing Guidelines

[Victoria G. Laidler]

Erik Tollerud wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 11:03 AM, Mark Sienkiewicz <sienkiew at stsci.edu> wrote:
>   
>> Erik Tollerud wrote:
>>     
>>> In principle, the similarities between nose and py.test mean we
>>> wouldn't really have to make a decision until we need features that
>>> differ between them- developers could run whichever they prefer...
>>>
>>>       
>> If the decision goes that way, I can write up a document describing a common
>> subset that covers most of what you need to do in routine testing.  Then you
>> make your standard "use the astrolib-defined nose/py.test subset whenever it
>> is practical".  Only a few unusual cases will need to deviate.
>>     
>
> That seems like a great idea to me.  Unless there are objections, I'm
> inclined to suggest we adopt py.test as the suggested runner based on
> it having the widest compatibility... Or are there still misgivings
> about this? (I'm speculating not given that there's been nothing on
> this topic in the last couple weeks.)
>   
Mike Droettboom has experimented with py.test a little bit while working 
on a py.test plugin for Pandokia. He reports that it's not quite so 
compatible as all that, ie, there are useful test extensions (such as 
module-level setup and teardown) that are supported by nose that py.test 
does not handle correctly.

Mike, do you want to say more about that?


Also, I meant to report back regarding the status of nose that I got 
from the TiP folks a bit ago:


- the primary developer of nose, Jason Pellerin, doesn't have time to do 
very much, but there is starting to be more maintenance activity and 
contribution from the community on the nose-dev list 
(http://groups.google.com/group/nose-dev).  nose 1.1 was released at the 
end of July

- the plan is to move to a BSD-licensed nose2 package based on the 
unittest2 plugins branch, but that unittest2 branch is on hold until the 
unittest2 developer (Michael Foord) can get back to it. 
(https://bitbucket.org/jpellerin/nose2/overview, 
http://hg.python.org/unittest2/)