[TIP] tox, 2to3 and py.test

Florian Bauer Florian.Bauer at diasemi.com
Tue Apr 3 01:57:38 PDT 2012


Hi Eduardo


> From: Eduardo Schettino [mailto:schettino72 at gmail.com] 
>  
> On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 4:11 PM, Florian Bauer
> <Florian.Bauer at diasemi.com> wrote:
>  
>> The py.test documentation recommends that test/ should not be a
>> package, and I understand why.
>  
> I dont really understand why... and I could not find any
> reference in the docs on why this is recommended. Can someone
> please explain it?

Good that you ask, I think this point is a bit subtle.
The reason why you couldn't find anything in the docs is because I gave the wrong reference, it is actually in the tox docs at the bottom of the page here: http://tox.testrun.org/latest/example/pytest.html 

My project in its current form is a good example of the pitfalls of having a test package

Say this is my source code layout:

 mypackage/__init__.py
 mypackage/spam.py
 mypackage/test/__init__.py
 mypackage/test/test_spam.py

test_spam.py starts with
from mypackage.spam import eggs

if I now run py.test from my source directory, it would walk the file system and find the file mypackage/test/test_spam.py
Then it constructs the fully qualified name of this file, which is mypackage.test.test_spam , as it is part of a package, and imports it.
Likewise, mypackage.spam gets imported as well.
As long as I call py.test from the source directory, I know that I imported the files mypackage/spam.py and mypackage/test/test_spam.py

The fun begins in conjunction with tox and similar tools. Tox is supposed to run code installed in a private a virtualenv, say .tox/py26/lib/site-packages/mypackage or .tox/py32/lib/site-packages/mypackage
Which, in the given scenario it won't do, because mypackage/test/test_spam comes earlier on the module search path.

I showed a tox.ini in my first e-mail that works around the issue, but it took some time to figure out, why python3 was importing modules containing python 2 syntax ;)

HTH
Florian

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