[SciPy-User] Pylab - standard packages

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 23 September 2012 14:41, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:
>> At least `nose`, we have to be able to run tests for packages.
>
> We do, but for new users, unit testing is something they're unlikely
> to need for a while. Installing nose also doesn't involve any complex
> requirements. So I'd be inclined not to specify it, but I'd like to
> hear what others think.

IMHO nose should absolutely be on the list. The first thing I teach
people is the boilerplate to put at the bottom of their modules:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import nose
    nose.runmodule()

And the target audience isn't just brand new users anyway. Sample code
should contain tests, so it's helpful to have a convention for how
they're named and how you write assertions, and both of these come
from nose as the de facto standard.

-n