[Numpy-discussion] Nose testing for numpy

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

I've just finished moving the scipy tests over to nose.

Thinking about it, it seems to me to be a good idea to do the same for numpy.

The advantages of doing this now are that numpy and scipy would be in
parallel, that we can continue to have one testing system for both,
and that it would be clear to both numpy and scipy developers that
they should not use NumpyTest but the nose test framework.  At the
moment, you can still find yourself using the numpy test framework in
scipy, and the tests will work - but it should be deprecated.
Ideally, to make a clean switch, I think using numpytest should raise
an error.

One issue is that the scipy nose test labels use decorators, for which
the standard syntax requires python 2.4.  To avoid this, we can just
apply the decorators with the

def test_func(): pass
test_func = dec.slow(test_func)

syntax.  It's a rather moot point, as the decorators are mainly used
to define test level, there's only one extra test found for
numpy.test(10) compared to numpy.test().

I think I could do the port in quite a short time.

Any thoughts?

Matthew