[Python-Dev] Bilingual scripts

[Barry Warsaw]

On May 28, 2013, at 08:02 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

>On Tue, 28 May 2013 13:27:18 -0400
>Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
>> On May 25, 2013, at 09:53 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>> 
>> >How about always running the version specific targets, e.g.
>> >nosetests-2.7?
>> 
>> We have nosetests-2.7 and nosetests3 in /usr/bin, but we generally recommend
>> folks not use these, especially for things like (build time) package tests.
>> It's harder to iterate over when the installed versions are unknown
>> statically, e.g. if you wanted to run all the tests over all available
>> versions of Python.
>
>It sounds like you want a dedicated script or utility for this ("run
>all the tests over all available versions of Python") rather than hack
>it every time you package a Python library.

There is some support for this in some of the Debian helpers, e.g. pybuild,
but that's not in widespread use.  One problem is that there's no definitive
way to know how to run a package's test suite (and won't be even in after PEP
426).  I tried to generate some momentum around trying to standardize this,
but it didn't get anywhere.

Still, that's just one small aspect of the problem.

>Your use case also doesn't seem to impact end-users.

Depends on who the end-users are.  It definitely impacts developers.

>> This is why I would really like to see all scripts provide a -m equivalent
>> for command line invocation.  This might be a little awkward for < Python
>> 2.7 (where IIRC -m doesn't work with packages).
>
>Do you still support Python < 2.7?

Debian still does support 2.6, but hopefully not for long!

-Barry