Re: [Pyunit-interest] comments on PyUnit

[Guido v. R. <gu...@di...>]

>   Yes.  I propose that the Python Library Reference only document one
> name for each method.  *Which* name should be decided here.
>   This issue exists for the following pairs of names:
> 
>       failUnless  /  assert_

failUnless

>       assertEqual  / assertEquals

failUnlessEqual

>       assertNotEqual  / assertNotEquals

failIfEqual

Also, assertRaises should be changed to failUnessRaises, etc.

> I wrote:
>  >   - Guido suggests using a unique exception for test failures, similar
>  >     to the use of TestFailed in the Python regression test.  This
>  >     allows the test errors to be distinguished from the traditional
>  >     use of "assert" in Python modules.  For backward compatibility it
>  >     might be reasonable to subclass from AssertionError.
> 
> Steve:
>  > That doesn't help backward compatibility, because the framework would still
>  > have to catch 'AssertionError' in order to detect failures.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand why -- do you *really* want to catch failures
> from assert statements, or is there some other motivation?  I'd be
> inclined to group AssertionError separately from some new exception
> raised by test code.

The problem is that many test suites (e.g. the Zope tests for
PageTemplates :-) use assert statements instead of calls to fail*() /
assert*() methods.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)