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

[Jonathan Lange]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 15:48, Marius Gedminas <marius at gedmin.as> wrote:
>> 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
>
> Because they are a bitch to debug, relies on details of output, which
> makes them brittle, hard to port to Python 3, and can be tricky to set
> up with loads of subtle things like inheriting the environment from
> where the DocTest was created, etc.
>

You may wish to read:
  http://bemusement.org/diary/2008/October/23/narrative-tests
  http://bemusement.org/diary/2008/October/24/more-doctest-problems

which are an extended meditation on the whole topic.

jml