[SciPy-dev] the state of scipy unit tests

[josef.pktd at gmail.com]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 4:39 PM, Xavier Gnata <xavier.gnata at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Nathan Bell wrote:
>>> I don't understand your argument.  You propose to make 'fast' be the
>>> thing that developers run before committing changes to SVN and then
>>> argue that this will lead to more tests being run?  Who runs the slow
>>> tests?
>>
>> Users. But well, it looks like I am in minority, so let's go for your
>> suggestion.
>>
>> David
>
>
> Well looks like "unitary tests" versus "integration tests".
> Sounds good. Many users use the svn (for various reasons).
> >From there point of view, it could be problem when the svn is really broken.
> Small test to be quite sure the svn is not broken and extensive tests
> run once per X and/or by users (after a fresh install)
>
> Xavier
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Now that 0.7 has been tagged, shall I decorate my tests as slow?

nosetests -A "not slow"  or  scipy.test() will then exclude the 4-5
minutes of distributions tests.
Without my tests (default setting with not slow) scipy.stats takes 4-6 seconds.

I started to profile one of the tests and some distributions are very
slow, they provide the correct results but the generic way of
calculating takes a lot of time.

example: For the R distribution, rdist, the test runs two kolmogorov
smirnov tests and has about 4 million function calls to the _pdf
function, I guess mostly to generate 2000 random variables in a
generic way based only on the pdf.

Selectively tagging and excluding time expensive methods, is too much
work for me right now, because which methods are expensive depends on
what methods are defined in each specific distribution.

Josef