[SciPy-dev] Add bz2 support to io.mmio [not tested] <--

[Nathan Bell]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Pearu Peterson <pearu at cens.ioc.ee> wrote:
>  > Your change consists of only 5 lines of code, but what happens when
>  > the bz2 module changes its calling convention in Python 3k?  We'd
>  > happily ship SciPy without even knowing that the compressed matrix
>  > market loading was completely unusable.
>
>  That's a convincing point for me.

In my experience the main benefit of the unittests is not to determine
whether a newly introduced feature has an error, but rather to keep
subsequent contributors (with less expertise/knowledge of the code)
from breaking it.  I tend to think of it as a contract between myself
and future developers.  For instance, when making substantial changes
to scipy.sparse I found the unittests to be immensely helpful in
expressing the intentions of the previous authors.

>  > I sincerely hope that I am overreacting, and that there is nothing to
>  > be concerned about, but as it stands I see a very real problem here.
>
>  You are right, of course. Please keep hammering us to write unittests
>  for any new code.

I can say from personal experience that you're not the first to be
reprimanded by Stefan about unittests :)

-- 
Nathan Bell wnbell at gmail.com
http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~wnbell/