[Python-Dev] Proposed unittest changes

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 11:55 PM, somebody wrote:
> I'm surprised nobody (that I've noticed) has brought up the point yet that
[...]

Not picking on whoever wrote that specifically, but if there's
anything that surprises me, it's how many people have voiced opinions
already (including many of them that I hadn't heard in this group
before). There doesn't seem to be an end to this debate, and it is
awfully close to deteriorating to pure bikeshedding and attempted
ad-hominem attacks. I really don't have time to participate in detail,
since all the time I have for Python I need to spend on trying to help
review the 2.6 and 3.0 beta releases. But I want to remind people that
radical changes to the unittest infrastructure will inconvenience many
large 3rd party projects using Python, and I urge folks to look for
ways to improve the unittest APIs in other ways instead. It's not the
end of the world if the unittesting API uses assertEqual() instead of
assert_equal() until the end of times. It would, however, be a shame
if we couldn't agree to *add* a bunch of features, for example better
reporting when two lists or long strings differ.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)