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

[Wichert Akkerman]

Previously Tres Seaver wrote:
> Gary Poster wrote:
> > I did a five-minute skim of the checkin but hope to look a bit more  
> > tomorrow.  Hopefully Marius, Benji, Albertas, or someone else who has  
> > actually done work on this package will take a look and chime in.
> > 
> > I did have one somewhat trivial thought.  I generally prefer durations  
> > and intervals expressed as datetime.timedeltas myself, because they  
> > convey their meaning without having to look it up docs (is that number  
> > value a number of seconds?  milliseconds?  minutes?).  There might  
> > even be a zcml built in for schema field for that; I believe I  
> > remember that there is in ZConfig.
> > 
> > Also, some variety of doctest would be nice.  Even when a package is  
> > not using doctests, I add new tests as doctest unless there's a really  
> > good reason not to.
> 
> Becuase they make for poor unit tests?  Using them to document the
> "mainline" use cases for an API is one thing:  using them to do thorough
> coverage of edge cases is quite another. I find that for the latter,
> they fail *both* as documentation *and* as tests:  their value as
> documentation drops as the amount of scaffoldiing rises, and the lack of
> isolation between tests sharply reduces their value for testing the corners.
> 
> I realize I have said this before, but then others keep urging the
> "doctests everywhere" meme.

Indeed, and for that reason this can't be said enough. Doctests are
useful to create testable documentation. They are not the right tool to
create isolated, debuggable tests.

Wichert.

-- 
Wichert Akkerman <wichert at wiggy.net>    It is simple to make things.
http://www.wiggy.net/                   It is hard to make things simple.