[SciPy-dev] the state of scipy unit tests

[David Cournapeau]

Nathan Bell wrote:
>
> As a general rule, more tests are better.  OTOH, tests that people
> *choose not to run* are not helpful.

Agreed. But you can choose not to run scipy.stats, right ?

>
> 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.

Yes, but if you don't run a subset of the tests at all, you run into the
same kind of issues anyway, no ? In Scipy, most packages are relatively
independent from each other, so a 'fast' mode to check that you did not
screw up badly (some import stuff, etc...) is enough most of the time.

IOW, I prefer something where you have to explicitly disregard tests
rather than explicitly include them.

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

:)

David