[Python-Dev] Proposed unittest changes

[Jonathan Lange]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 12:54 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> 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))
>

Hi,

Some things that Bazaar, Twisted and Launchpad have found helpful:

- assertRaises returning the exception object that it catches. This
allows for easy testing of exception strings.

- Assertion methods for 'in', 'is' and 'isinstance' and their negations.

- TestCase.addCleanup. This method takes a function, args and kwargs
and pushes them to a stack of cleanups. Before tearDown is run, each
of these cleanups is popped off the stack and then run. This makes it
easier to acquire certain resources in tests:

e.g

def make_temp_dir(self):
    dir = tempfile.mkdtemp()
    self.addCleanup(shutil.rmtree, dir)
    return dir

Luckily, I have patches (with tests!) for these that I will be filing
on the tracker as soon as I get the opportunity.

jml