[Python-Dev] Re: how to test behavior wrt an extension type?

[Alex Martelli]

On 2005 Jan 17, at 14:45, Anthony Baxter wrote:
    ...
>> both, but, of course, everybody's welcome to help!).  Surely this 
>> can't
>> be the first case in which a bug got triggered only by a certain
>> behavior in an extension type, but I couldn't find precedents.  Ideas,
>> suggestions, ...?
>
> Beats me - worst comes to worst, I guess we ship the unittest code
> there with a try/except around the ImportError on the new 'copytest'
> module, and the test skips if it's not built. Then we don't build it by
> default, but if someone wants to build it and check it, they can. I 
> don't
> like this much, but I can't think of a better alternative. Shipping a 
> new
> extension module just for this unittest seems like a bad idea.

Agreed about this issue not warranting the shipping of a new extension 
module -- however, in the patch (to the 2.3 maintenance branch) which I 
uploaded (and assigned to you), I followed the effbot's suggestion, and 
added the type needed for testing to the already existing "extension 
module for testing purposes", namely Modules/_testcapi.c -- I don't 
think it can do any harm there, and lets test/test_copy.py do all of 
its testing blissfully well.  I haven't even made the compilation of 
the part of Modules/_testcapi.c which hold the new type conditional 
upon anything, because I don't think that having it there 
unconditionally can possibly break anything anyway... _testcapi IS only 
used for testing, after all...!


Alex