[Python-ideas] Adding a test discovery into Python

[Brett Cannon]

On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 09:10, Guilherme Polo <ggpolo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I believe it would be good to include a test discovery into Python,
> right now I notice all the following packages:
>
> bsdbb, ctypes, distutils, email, json, lib2to3 and lib-tk (tkinter in py3k)
>

... and importlib.

> duplicate some form of test discovery that works for each one of them
> (there are also sqlite3 tests, but they are not using a real "test
> discovery"). In the future it is very likely that this "duplication
> count" increases, since from time to time new modules and packages get
> into Python. I can also feel the "idlelib" package starting getting
> tests, just making things worse.
>
> External packages would benefit from it too. Right now you either
> duplicate the test discovery once more (because your project is small
> enough that you don't want to use something specific for that), or you
> use nose, trial, py.test or whatever looks better for you.
>
> So.. is there any chance we can enter in agreement what features would
> be useful in a test discovery that could be included with Python ? I
> for myself do not have fancy wishes for this one, I would be happy
> with something that would collect unittests, inside packages and
> subpackages, with some fixed patterns and let me run them with
> test.test_support.run_unittests, or maybe something that would collect
> unittests and doctests and have something like run_tests in
> test.test_support. But then I believe this wouldn't be good enough to
> substitute any of the current tools, making the addition mostly
> useless.

Yep. I want to be able to state "find the tests in this package and
search the entire package top-down looking for tests to run". The only
trick is if you store the tests in something other than on the file
system directly (e.g. zipfile). That would require a little bit more
work like having modules listed in the __all__ value of the package
and use that to know which modules to look in.

-Brett

-Brett