[AstroPy] Tests for AstroPy (was POLL: vision for a common Astronomy package)

[Erik Bray]

On 07/06/2011 12:01 PM, Victoria G. Laidler wrote:
> although I suppose once we go outside the standard library, the issue of
> "which of these tools will astropy ship with to support its internal
> testing" becomes important. :/ Although, another possible approach is to
> segment the tests, so you can run the minimum tests (described above)
> without installing anything extra, and additional tests if you feel like
> also installing whatever the package developer likes for testing.
>
> There's also a very active Testing in Python mailing list, to which you
> can subscribe from the taxonomy page.
>
> Vicki

As a side note on testing:  setuptools/distribute supports on option in 
setup.py files called 'tests_require' (or something like that) that 
lists all required packages (nose, unittest2, etc) for running that 
particular project's tests.  Those requirements won't be installed 
unless the user wants to run the tests.

There are also discussions for adding a similar feature in 
distutils2/packaging, though the details haven't been finalized yet. 
Point being, there are ways to solve that particular issue...

Erik