[Python-Dev] unittest bug

[Ethan Furman]

Michael Foord wrote:
> On 3 Aug 2011, at 22:58, Ethan Furman wrote:
>> Michael Foord wrote:
>>> On 3 Aug 2011, at 21:36, Ethan Furman wrote:
>>>> My apologies for posting here first, but I'm not yet confident enough in my bug searching fu, and duplicates are a pain.
>>>>
>>>> Here's the issue:
>>>>
>>>> from unittest import *
 >>>
>>> That's the bug right there. Just import TestCase and main and everything should work fine. Using "import *" is not recommended except at the interactive interpreter and it doesn't play well with unittest.main which does magic introspection to find tests to run.
 >>
>> If from xxx import * is not supported, why provide __all__?  
> 
> a) to define the public API

In trying to refute this, I found 
http://docs.python.org/py3k/reference/simple_stmts.html?highlight=__all__#the-import-statement
and learned something new.  Thanks, Michael!

I think I'll withdraw my bug report, however -- since
`from ... import *` is already noted as usually bad practice it should 
fall on the shoulders of the modules where it is /supposed/ to work to 
advertise that, and absent any such advertisement it should not be used.

~Ethan~