[Python-ideas] Make test.test_support an alias to test.support

[Nick Coghlan]

On 9 August 2013 07:34, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> While I strongly feel we should have done this, and some other aliases (like
> Tkinter as alias for tkinter, etc, and dump 'lib-tk') in 2.7.0, it seems too
> late for these changes now. The problem, as with any new 2.7 feature, is
> that if 'support' were added in 2.7.6, test code that depends on 'support'
> would not run on 2.7.5-. While the contents of /test are 'internal use
> only', it seems to me that being able to run the test suite is a documented,
> public feature.
>
> However, we could say that one should only run the 2.7.z test suite with the
> 2.7.z interpreter and stdlib.

This is certainly the case - you can't run the test suite for a later
version against an earlier version and expect it to work.

> If we do that, I would like to change the
> illegal name 'lib-tk' to '_libtk' and change the tk/ttk tests accordingly.
> If 'can change or be removed without notice between releases of Python.'
> refers to bug-fix releases as well as version releases, I might propose a
> few more changes, or rather, to  also backport proposed changes for 3.4 to
> 2.7.

Don't go too overboard with it, but the test suite is definitely more
open to updates than the standard library itself. (e.g. the conversion
of test.support to a package was applied to the 3.3 maintenance branch
to keep it in sync with the default branch).

And PEP 434 certainly applies to IDLE's test suite in addition to IDLE itself.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia