[Zope-dev] Re: zope.sendmail Retry fixes and new state machine.

[Martijn Pieters]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 6:09 PM, Wichert Akkerman <wichert at wiggy.net> wrote:
>  The fact that something is popular does not necessarily mean it is the
>  right thing :)
>
>  Lack of isolation is a very convincing argument to me.
>
>  Perhaps more personal taste but I also find python unittests to be much
>  more readable. You don't suffer from mixing lots of test setup/teardown
>  being repeated through the file. As Tres mentioned this is especially
>  true when testing corner cases.
>
>  Being able to debug tests by stepping over them with pdb is incredibly
>  useful. With doctests that doesn't work.
>
>  Being able to run a single test easily allows for quick testing and
>  debugging. I can't tell the testrunner 'start running at line 52 but
>  also include all the test setup magic from before, but skip the rest'. With
>  unittests I can simple run zopectl test -s <module> -t <test function>.
>
>  doctests hurt my productivity badly.

I completely agree with Tres' and Wichert's statements on this. I only
use doctests where they actually would make sense as documentation,
the corner cases I always write as unit tests. The tools for dealing
with pure Python code are so much more powerful than for
python-embedded-in-text-with-prefixes, as well.

-- 
Martijn Pieters