Suppose I find a bug (say, zope.testing.testrunner.StartUpFailure objects make unittest.TextTestRunner cry). Being a good developer I want to start the bug fix with a unit test.
Now if zope.testing used old-style isolated unit tests, I could open the tests.py (or tests/test_testrunner.py) in a text editor and start writing: class OptionsStub(object): post_mortem = False def doctest_StartUpFailure(): """Test that StartUpFailure is a proper unittest.TestCase StartUpFailure is a TestCase-lookalike that is inserted into the test suite to indicate that a failed import of a test module won't be unnoticed. >>> from zope.testing.testrunner import StartUpFailure >>> options = OptionsStub() >>> module_name = 'test_me' >>> exc_info = (ImportError, ImportError('zonkulator'), None) >>> test = StartUpFailure(options, module_name, exc_info) >>> unittest.TextTestRunner(verbosity=2).run(test) This is a regression test for http://launchpad.net/bugs/221151 """ There, I'm almost done. Now I can fix the bug and paste the correct output into the doctest. But zope.testing uses narrative doctests instead of isolated unit tests. There are 22 plain-text files that together comprise over 4500 lines of text. Now instead of mechanically opening the appropriate test module and grepping for the class/function name I have to figure out which of the txt files is the appropriate place for the new test. After that I have to figure out how to insert it into the narrative seamlessly. Or decide to create a new file---but a hundred of .txt files each 20-lines long is not a good idea, in my opinion. Suddenly I almost don't want to fix the bug any more. While I was writing this, I suddenly realised that almost all zope.testing's txt files are actually functional tests. There are nearly no unit tests there. Perhaps that's what causing me pain. I still maintain that: * adding a new unit test should be a trivial task * extending a narrative doctest is not a trivial task * the only way to solve this conflict is to explicitly separate unit tests (test_*.py) from doctest-enhanced API documentation (*.txt). Marius Gedminas -- UNIX is user friendly. It's just selective about who its friends are.
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