(devel) a note about automated tests and how we're going to do them moving forward

[Michael DeHaan]

Michael DeHaan wrote:
> I've switching "make test" to call unit tests via nose, which produces 
> some nicer output from the same test code.
>
> To get nose, you'll need to:
>
>    # yum install nose
>
> Nose can also be called with coverage if you uncomment that part of 
> the Makefile.
>
>    # easy_install coverage
>
> While currently a lot of tests exist in tests/test.py the intent is 
> for new tests to live with the code, so that they have a greater hope 
> of being maintained when folks add features (since they will obviously 
> be in the same file). 
> For instance, XMLRPC tests will live in remote.py.
>
> Nose allows for tests to be named "test_something" and it will find 
> functions of that form and see if any asserts in them fail.
>
> For instance:
>
>    assert x == 2, "verify that the return code is two"
>
> Another nice feature of nose is that when running "make test" the 
> output is a lot nicer, it will only show stdout/stderr for tests that 
> actually fail, so there's a lot less noise to sift through.
>
> --Michael
>

Wrong list, grr