[Numpy-discussion] change made to test_print.py

[Stéfan van der Walt]

2009/1/9 David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com>:
> On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 5:36 AM, Christopher Hanley <chanley at stsci.edu> wrote:
>>
>> I do not expect the trunk to always work.  I even expect it to have
>> bugs.  However, I do not expect there to be test failures for known
>> reasons that result in wasSuccessful() returning false.  This is a bad
>> programming practice.  It creates work for people trying to figure out
>> what is wrong when the answer is already know.
>
> Well, I don't agree it is bad practice: it is not ideal, yes, but I
> don't think using KnownFailure is much better. My rationale being that
> known failures are almost never worked on because it does not bug
> anyone anymore, and it is very easy to forget about them - AFAICS,
> most numpy/scipy known failures have never been worked on after being
> tagged as such. I don't think we have a good system for those cases,
> be it known failure - or just failing.

I agree with you point of view, but I also have sympathy for
Cristopher's situation.  I thought a solution to both problems would
be if we could find an easy way of executing all skipped tests as if
they were never decorated.  Turns out nose already has this
functionality:

nosetests numpy --no-skip

I think we should urge developers to run the test suite this way, so
that we remain aware of failures, even if they are decorated.

Hope that helps,
Stéfan