[Python-Dev] Py3k DeprecationWarning in stdlib
Nick Coghlan
ncoghlan at gmail.com
Thu Jun 26 17:14:36 CEST 2008
Jean-Paul Calderone wrote:
> The first assertion passes (by the way, I don't understand why w.message
> isn't the message passed to warn, but is instead an instance of
> UserWarning)
> but the second assertion fails.
See Brett's comment elsewhere in this thread about the level of thought
(or lack thereof) that went into the design of some of the test_support
APIs (including catch_warning).
> A more subtle example might include two
> functions, the first of which is deprecated and called by the second, and
> one test for each of them. Now the test for the warning will only pass if
> it runs before the other test; if they accidentally run in the other order,
> you won't see the warning, so as far as I can tell, you can't reliably
> write
> a unit test for warnings using catch_warning.
Yeah, the Python regression tests actually cheat quite a bit when it
comes to testing warnings - several of the tests clear the warning cache
just in case the warning has already been triggered by other code.
I suspect what some of those tests *should* be doing (aside from those
testing the warning module itself) is configuring the warning system to
convert the relevant warnings to exceptions, then catching the resulting
exception.
> The real problem with testing many uses of the warning system is that it
> doesn't expose enough public APIs for this to be possible. You *have*
> to use APIs which are, apparently, private (such as warn_explicit).
Hmm, I think the bigger problem is that there is no documented way to
save the warnings filter and restore it to a previous state - the
'filters' attribute (which holds the actual list of filters) isn't
documented and isn't included in __all__. This makes it hard to write an
officially supported test that fiddles with the warning settings then
puts them back the way they were.
Cheers,
Nick.
--
Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
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