[Zope-dev] Re: zope.sendmail Retry fixes and new state machine.

[Jim Fulton]

On Mar 13, 2008, at 12:11 AM, Paul Winkler wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 09:25:59AM -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
>> It is certainly straightforward enough to create isolated  
>> doctests.  For
>> edge cases, I do typically create separate isolated short doctests  
>> that
>> deal just with that case.  The assertion that doctests don't allow
>> isolation is simply not correct.
>
> Can you think of a package offhand that I might look at to see a good
> example of this?

zc.buildout is one.

> I've got a lot of overgrown, brittle doctests at work that need
> gradual reorganization, and I'd love to see some good role models.

Hopefully, zc.buildout isn't too bad.

Some common doctest traps that I fall into:

- Making test files too long -- even for mainline tests.

- Writing test files that aren't good documentation.  I've been trying  
out a new practice of creating ".test" files rather than ".txt" files  
when I don't plan to spend much effort on documentation. I still like  
to try to tell a story, even if the story is aimed at the  
implementor.  I also don't mind trading off some isolation for flow.   
I do still prefer to put edge cases into their own tests.

Jim

--
Jim Fulton
Zope Corporation