[TIP] Ideology

[Doug Philips]

After the past week or two of emails, I went back and looked at the current websites for nose and py.test to see if they provide enough to make "moving up" from a customized unittest worth it.

I found lots of features (mostly discovery, running tests in parallel, etc) that we don't need.

One feature (keyword support mentioned by py.test) that we do use, but it would still have to be extended for our use.

Critically, I did not find any of the other features we extended unittest for.

I found at least two features we'd have to work around:
   Tests running immediately upon discovery.
   'assert' causing a test failure.

Net of the net is that there is a lot of cool stuff in both systems (and I use that word 'systems' deliberately), some features we'd have to work around, and we'd still have to make custom extensions. No reason to 'move off of' unittest.

As I've detailed in many messages prior to this one, we're doing functional testing, not unit-testing by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, all we've needed are some simple extensions to unittest.
Subclassing TestCase has also give us a nice place to put our DSL-esque helper methods (self.power_cycle(), self.hard_reset(), ...).

   --Doug