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> Steve Purcell <purcell@users.sourceforge.net> added the comment:
> Hey, I'm open to anything. If I started writing unittest from scratch
> knowing what I know now, I'd probably have kept the API a little
> slimmer. Oh, and I'd have named everthing according to Python
> conventions; my deepest and belated apologies for that.
I think the current consensus is to start trimming the API in 3.1. We
could start documenting best practices in 2.6 and 3.0 though.
> I think the design has held up pretty well, even if it's arguably not
> the most pythonic. Its familiarity to users of other xUnit frameworks
> really does help new Pythoneers start writing tests immediately.
Though I wonder how common that use case is. Not all new Pythoneers
come from Java, you know... Many come from Perl, PHP, even C++, and
more and more come from not programming at all before.
> And as
> for the TestLoader stuff, it looks (and perhaps is) a bit overblown, but
> I can't count the number of times people have asked me how to do obscure
> or unusual things with the module and I've been able to respond with
> something like, "just write a custom TestLoader/TestRunner".
I hope we can add more custom TestLoader/TestRunner subclasses for
some of the *common* use cases.
> I don't intend to take unittest in any particular direction; truth be
> told, I'm now only an occasional visitor to the land of Python, and I
> don't think I've had commit rights since the move to subversion. My
> continued involvement with the unittest tickets is mainly to help
> provide input along the lines of "we discussed this years ago, and
> decided against it / thought it would be great". Far be it from me to
> stand in the way of progress -- I'd be happy to see unittest re-worked
> in any way that makes sense.
And thanks for your continued involvement! I think the clue the
developer community can take from this is not to worry too much about
changing the original design; you don't seem to have a strong sense of
"ownership", which (in this case) sounds good to me.