[Zope-dev] Circular dependency hell.

[Jonathan Lange]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 6:05 PM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
...
> == Suggestion 1 ==
>
> I think we should deprecate zope.testing. Completely. There has been
> some discussion about deprecating it for something else, but I think
> we should just deprecate it. Just say "Don't use zope.testing, it's
> pure evil". We can recommend another testrunner, and it seems nose is
> winning the wars in the Python world there, but I don't think we
> necessarily need to do that. Most testrunners will find the tests by
> themselves, and the tests should be runnable with any testrunner, so
> which one you use is a minor issue.

As the author of one of those other testrunners, I can tell you that
if you do this you'll find that your number one biggest problem is
getting layers to work.

> But zope.testing is a mess that builds on
> two other messes, namely unittest (yes, it's a bloody mess, the API
> makes no sense) and doctest (which is a horror of a mess).

unittest's API makes sense and it's not a mess. It's got problems, but
they are defects and not bone-deep. Further, the current maintainer of
unittest, Michael Foord, has been doing some excellent work in
addressing those defects.

The testing-in-python mailing list[1] is probably the best place to
take up the issue if you wish to do so.

jml

[1] http://lists.idyll.org/listinfo/testing-in-python