[Python-Dev] Proposed unittest changes

[Guido van Rossum]

I'm worried that a mass renaming would do anything but inconvenience
users during the already stressful 2->3 transition.

I'm more in favor of the original proposal of reducing the redundancy post-3.0.

If you're looking for useful features, Google has a set of extensions
to unittest.py that I find useful:

- module-level setUp and tearDown

- routines for comparing large lists and strings that produce useful
output indicating exactly where the inputs differ.

- assertLess etc.

- assertSameElements (sort of like assert(set(x) == set(y))

--Guido

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 6:49 AM, Michael Foord
<fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
>  I'm starting to put together a list of cleanups (with documentation
>  changes) for the unittest module. I thought someone had already done
>  this but the issue with the most comments I could find was 2578 which
>  doesn't go into much detail:
>
>  http://bugs.python.org/issue2578
>
>  The thing most people would like is test discovery - but that probably
>  requires some discussion before anything can be added to unittest.
>
>  What I would like to do is PEP-8'ify the method names (widening the API
>  rather than shrinking it!):
>
>     assert_true
>     assert_false
>     assert_equals
>     assert_not_equals
>     assert_raises
>     set_up
>     tear_down
>     failure_exception (? - class attribute)
>     TestSuite.add_test
>
>  (etc)
>
>  Documenting that these are to be preferred to 'assertEquals' and
>  'failUnlessEquals' (etc) and that the 'assert' statement should be used
>  instead of 'assert_'.
>
>  Adding the following new asserts:
>
>     assert_in    (member, container, msg=None)
>     assert_not_in     (member, container, msg=None)
>     assert_is     (first, second, msg=None)
>     assert_not_is   (first, second, msg=None)
>     assert_raises_with_message    (exc_class, message, callable, *args,
>  **keywargs)
>
>  A decorator to turn a test function into a TestCase ("as_test_case" ?).
>
>  A simple 'RunTests' function that takes a collection of modules, test
>  suites or test cases and runs them with TextTestRunner - passing on
>  keyword arguments to the test runner. This makes running a test suite
>  easier - once you have collected all your test cases together you can
>  just pass them to this function so long as you are happy with the
>  default runner (possibly allowing an alternative runner class to be
>  provided as a keyword argument).
>
>  I would provide an implementation for discussion of course.
>
>  I would also like to make the error messages for "assert_equals" and
>  "assert_not_equals" more useful - showing the objects that compare
>  incorrectly even if an explicit message is passed in. Additionally, when
>  comparing lists and tuples that are the same length show the members
>  (and indices?) that were different.
>
>  I've copied Steve Purcell into this email, but his comments on issue
>  2578 indicate that he is happy for 'us' to make changes and he no longer
>  has a string sense of "ownership" of this module.
>
>  Michael Foord
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)