[Distutils] RFC: Standard Declaration of tests in eggs

[Jim Fulton]

Here is a rough draft proposal for declaring tests in eggs:

Introduction
============

Software packages should have automated tests.  Consumers of
packages will often want to run these tests.  Tools should be able to
do this automatically.  This proposal seeks to provide a way for
automated tools to discover tests in distributions, including eggs, so
that tests can be run or so that test runners can be automatically
created to run the tests.

Proposal
========

This proposal aims to be extremely simple.  It has 2 parts:

1. A 'test_suite' entry point is defined.  An egg can provide zero or
    more test_suite entry points.  These entry points will define
    callable objects that can be called without arguments and that
    return unittest test suites.

2. An optional 'tests' extra is defined.  When creating test runners
    or dynamically loading distributions to load tests, any
    distributions listed in extra requires for the 'tests' extra shall
    be included in the working set for the test runner.

Thoughts?

Jim

-- 
Jim Fulton           mailto:jim at zope.com       Python Powered!
CTO                  (540) 361-1714            http://www.python.org
Zope Corporation     http://www.zope.com       http://www.zope.org