[Zope3-dev] Re: doctests in *.txt files

[Jim Fulton]

Mark McEahern wrote:
> Garrett Smith wrote:
> 
>> Nevermind...I just found:
>>
>>   zope/interfaces/adapter.txt
>>
>> Btw, anyone interested in a powerful idea for software 
>> testing/development, take a look at this.
> 
> 
> 
> At PyCON, Jim Fulton mentioned that it would be nice to add to test.py a 
> facility for finding/running pure text doctest-based tests.

I don't think I said this.  I didn't mean to.  I intend to simply
provide a way to explictly name text files containing tests in test
modules.

 > Here's a
> simple method for turning a text file into a doctest.DocTestSuite:
> 
> def suiteFromText(name):
>    basename = os.path.basename(name)
>    prefix, ext = os.path.splitext(basename)
>    m = new.module(prefix)
>    m.__doc__ = file(name).read()
>    m.__file__ = name
>    return doctest.DocTestSuite(m)
> 
> The simplest thing that could possibly work would be to add 
> suiteFromText() to test.py as well as an option like --text to find/run 
> *.txt in the directories/packages specified by the other options.
> 
> Does this smell too hackish?

It smells too implicit.

We intend to add a function to zope.testing.doctestunit, and later
to doctest, to allow a text file to be named from within a package's
tests.py file (or package).

> Jim also mentioned that it would be nice to refactor test.py so that it 
> could be generally useful outside of Zope3.  I'd like to tackle that if 
> no one else is working on it.

OK. Great.  Graham Fawcett got a start on that at PyCon, but It turned out
more complicated than I thought due to some issues which Jeremy mentioned.

Graham actually worked on 2 things:

- Changing the argument handling a bit to make running both unit and functional
   the default. This required rearranging some other options.  He also
   provided more long versions of options.

- Providing a separate configuration file to customize the test runner for
   different projects.

I'll try to get the first bit of work checked in this week.

See me response to Jeremy.

Jim

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