[RFC] depend on testtools for testing?

[Vincent Ladeuil]

So, I'll speak from personal experience with testtools and
subunit in a specific context: running the full bzr test suite
with --parallel=fork in babune.

That means I had to install and maintain both packages for hardy,
jaunty, karmic, FreeBSD7, FreeBSD8, gentoo, OSX 10.4 and OSX 10.5.

Problems encountered: none.

Upgrades required since the *beginning* of the babune experiment: 1 (2 ?).

I run both of them from trunk so the hard dependency is already
there AFAICT. I agree with John that nested trees can address
that nicely, but in the mean time, people that want to run the
test suite can very well issue 'bzr branch
lp:testools/lp:subunit' and be done with it, providing that we
explain: 1) where to issue them, 2) what needs to be configured
for bzr to find them. They already have a working bzr and they
already need to run make anyway so we may even consider adding a
target there[1].

So far, I've considered that (1) was part of each slave setup and
(2) a matter of setting PYTHONPATH in each slave configuration.

In fact, I lied, slave.mk (included by all slave Makefiles)
contains:
# ${HOME}/lib/python for slave specific versions
#     (including testtools and subunit for selftest --parallel=fork)
export PYTHONPATH=${HOME}/lib/python

So it's defined once and since many slaves runs as guests on the
same host, I even share a single branch for each package with NFS
automounts...

My point is that if we ever have a problem in one of the
OS/release above (and more are planned), I'll certainly be the
first to know and probably one of the first to upgrade, these
packages are used everyday to run the test suite on the tip of
bzr.dev...

Since both of these packages are for TDD freaks, I can only hope
that they'll get even better tested than bzr but also better
tested that they are today ;-) And from that I'm not that
concerned about bugs there.

I wish I could better track what happen in these packages and
hopefully I will get there eventually, but so far, I've been
quite happy *using* them and didn't really suffer from the small
bugs we encountered.

I also wish they could evolve *faster* ;-) 

All in all, I think we have other dependencies that are more
problematic that this one.

          Vincent

[1]: That left people without internet access in the dark ?
Well... we'll find something for them ;-)