[SciPy-dev] the state of scipy unit tests

[Nathan Bell]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 2:09 AM, David Cournapeau
<david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
>
> I don't agree much on that reasoning. Test are useful; the more run by
> default, the better; tests which are not run by default are nearly
> useless IMO, since not many people would run tests with options; since
> there are ways to restrict tests to a meaningful subset (per
> subpackage), I think this is enough; if some tests can be run faster,
> then ok, but not if it requires to lose some test coverage.
>

As a general rule, more tests are better.  OTOH, tests that people
*choose not to run* are not helpful.

> Why does the test time matter so much to you ?

I want to know that my changes to scipy.sparse haven't adversely
affected other parts of scipy.  To my knowledge, there are only a few
such modules (io, maxentropy, spatial, and sparse.linalg), so I could,
in principle, test those directly and call it a day.  However, it's
possible that modules that depend on those modules will expose errors
that would be hidden otherwise.

>
> I hear you, I would like the whole build + test process for scipy to be
> faster too :) If 4 minutes sounds long, what about build + test on
> windows, which takes at least 20 minutes (to multiply by three when I
> build the superpack - and the process can't even be controlled remotely) !
>

Still, I'm not giving up my C++ templates :)

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