[TIP] Generating tests, II (was: Re: Meta-test methods...)

Douglas Philips dgou at mac.com
Fri Apr 24 12:35:27 PDT 2009


On or about 2009 Apr 24, at 3:10 PM, C. Titus Brown indited:

> I'm trying to figure out why I dislike the non-decorator tagging so  
> much; I think because I want
> to know what the signature of a test function is up front, without
> looking at the end.  That conflicts with 'yield' too, though.  I guess
> I'm just inconsistent.

Cracking open a method and examining how it is implemented is just  
plain and simple: a hack. If it were in code I was reviewing, I would  
classify it as a bug. If there were no other way, sure, it might be  
tolerable. But there are other ways. At least two that that are  
actually Pythonic.

If the py.test/nose dudes had used new naming convention, would you  
really have balked at it? Would you have thought it complicated or un- 
usable? Would you have thought "Oh, that makes sense, this is a  
different part of the testing eco-system" of course it needs a  
different name?

Is there an objection here other than that you've become familiar with  
one particular way of doing things?

Is that why you object to buildbot? Its a pretty complex system (a hot  
pot in the boiling-a-frog analogy). But if you're already familiar  
with a system (say a testing framework), then a slow accretion of  
features seems simple. Familiarity is the slow-heating-pot. I find  
these kinds of systems fascinating... how much familiarity is taken  
for simplicity.

-Doug




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