[Python-3000] doctests vs. unittests (was Re: pimp; restructuring the standard library)

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

On Thursday 28 June 2007, Chris McDonough wrote:
 > a) If one of your fixture calls or an assertion fails for some
 > reason, the rest of the test
 >     trips over itself trying to complete, usually without success
 > because an invariant
 >     hasn't been met, and you need to scroll through a bunch of decoy
 > output to
 >     see where the actual problem began.

The testrunner in zope.testing handles this by providing an option to hide the 
secondary failures, so only one traceback shows up per document.

 > b) I often use test bodies as convenient points to put a
 > pdb.set_trace call if I want to
 >     debug something.  This wasn't very well supported when I was
 > trying to use doctest.

The doctest in zope.testing supports this; hopefully someone sufficiently 
in-the-know can unfork that version.

 > As a result, I still use unittest pretty much exlusively to write
 > tests.  I'd be sad if it went away.

Yes; there's definately a place for unittest, or something very like it.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.   <fdrake at acm.org>