[Numpy-discussion] Switching to nose test framework (was: NumpyTest problem)

[Alan McIntyre]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 7:07 PM, Anne Archibald
<peridot.faceted at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/6/8 Alan McIntyre <alan.mcintyre at gmail.com>:
>> You can run the test scripts from the source tree without installing
>> them by using nosetests, like this: <snip>
>
> I am not enthusiastic about this change: it makes it harder for J.
> Random Hacker to run a fileful of tests. She has to know about the
> magical nose invocation - where should she find it out? If she's
> fiddling with the code she can hardly avoid finding the boilerplate,
> but will she know to go digging through the wiki (assuming it appears
> there) to find the magical invocation required to run a particular
> test?

Hmm you're right, it leaves no trail for someone to find out how to
run tests in a single module if they don't already know.  Now I'm
inclined to leave that little bit of code there. I'm glad I asked. :)

> Then again, it doesn't usually work for me to use the boilerplate to
> run a single test without installing, since the non-installed test
> doesn't necessarily find all the non-installed code, sometimes falling
> back on the installed code and giving false passes or mysterious
> failures. Usually I give up and just reinstall the whole beast and
> rerun all tests every time I make a change. How does nose behave in
> this situation?

Since I've been working mostly on the tests, I haven't really had to
cope with that yet.  The install only takes a short time (5-10 sec)
once everything is built, and I don't have to do it that often, but I
can see it would be a bit onerous if I was changing stuff that caused
recompiles, etc.

Is the stuff Robert pointed out on a wiki page somewhere? It would be
nice to have a "Welcome noob NumPy developer, here's how to do
NumPy-specific development things," page. There may be such a page,
but I just haven't stumbled across it yet.

Alan