[Numpy-discussion] Monkeypatching vs nose plugin?

[Alan McIntyre]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 11:32 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Since we're discussing this sort of thing, there's something I've been
>> meaning to ask anyway: do we really need to allow end users to pass in
>> arbitrary extra arguments to nose (via the extra_argv in test())?
>> This seems to lock us in to having a mostly unobstructed path from
>> test() through to an uncustomized nose backend.
>
> At least with other projects, I occasionally want to do things like
> run with --pdb-failure or --detailed-errors, etc. What exactly is
> extra_argv blocking?

It's not blocking anything; it just feels wrong for some reason.
Probably because I've been duck-punching nose and doctest to death to
make them act the way I want, and I can't fit all the
doctest/nose/unittest behavior in my head all at once to comfortably
say that any of those other options will still work correctly. ;)

It's probably just a pointless worry that will be moot after all the
monkeypatching is removed, since the underlying test libraries will be
in an unaltered state.

> My preference, actually, is for the nosetests
> command to be able to run our tests correctly if at all possible.

The unit tests will run just fine via nosetests, but the doctests
generally will not, because of the limited execution context
NoseTester now enforces on them.