[Zope-dev] RFC: Proposed new style for documenting and testing ZTK packages

[Benji York]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 9:48 AM, Marius Gedminas <marius at gedmin.as> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 12:50:23PM +0200, Adam GROSZER wrote:
>>
>> I'm somewhat vary on unittests. I've seen some damn cryptic ones that
>> took a lot of time to decipher.
>> A doctest somehow forces you to dump your mind (well at least that, if
>> we're not that brilliant techdoc writers).
>
> That's true, but if the doctest gets too long, any readability
> advantages are negated.
>
> If you've the discipline to keep the doctests short, I don't see why you
> shouldn't continue writing them instead of unit tests -- and by "short"
> I mean 1-7 statements:

You might be interested in Manuel's isolation mechanism:
http://packages.python.org/manuel/#test-isolation

> The downside of this style is that it's difficult to refactor common
> bits from the doctests into shared methods, so you end up with a lot of
> duplicated code.

If I understand you (which I'm not sure I do), I prefer to factor out
common code into test helpers that are either referenced in footnotes
(to keep all the code in one place) or in a separate module.
-- 
Benji York