[TIP] unittest & TDD

[Bob Ippolito]

On 3/11/07, Atul Varma <varmaa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/4/07, Bob Ippolito <bob at redivi.com> wrote:
> > I agree that unittest is straightforward, but it's annoying (on its
> > own). Too much unnecessary cruft.
>
> I agree.  Out of curiosity, is there any movement towards making
> py.test or nose a part of Python's standard library?  The main reason
> my company used unittest is, quite honestly, because we didn't look at
> any other testing options when we started writing our unit tests,
> assuming that the testing framework that shipped with Python was just
> "the one way to do it" (a la Python's motto).  We weren't huge fans of
> its complexity (or rather, the boilerplate cruft caused by said
> complexity), but we dealt with it.  The fact that unittest was pretty
> well documented helped a lot, too, but as soon as I saw py.test I had
> wished I'd known about it before I started writing unit tests.
>

That doesn't really happen until people ask for it on python-dev
(which may require writing a PEP). I think that nose is probably
aligned with the stdlib unittest enough and popular enough to where it
would be a good fit, but the eternal questions are is it mature enough
and who is going to maintain it in the stdlib.

Since easy_install became widespread, I stopped caring about the
stdlib... it just doesn't seem worth the process involved in proposing
and actualizing a stdlib change when third party installation is so
painless and can be updated at a different release cycle than Python
itself.

-bob