Comparison with unittest2

[philfreo]

Apologies if this question is too broad, but I didn't see anywhere in the documentation where you explicitly compare pytest to unittest2. It would be nice to understand what high level use cases pytest solves over unittest2.

One article for example states:

Although with unittest2 the convenience of py.test is coming to the standard library.

from http://halfcooked.com/presentations/pyconau2013/why_I_use_pytest.html

(e.g. now that unittest2 is available, does this mean I shouldn't use pytest?)

[nicoddemus]

Hi @philfreo,

That article is quite old, so it might not be a good reference.

According to PyPI:

unittest2 is a backport of the new features added to the unittest testing framework in Python 2.7 and onwards.

It basically allows you to use unittest features released in Python 3+ in Python 2.7, so I suspect that sentence in the article refers that unittest2 has test auto discovery, which pytest has had for a long time, along with a ton of other features not available in unittest or unittest2.

To an overview of all features of py.test, nose and unittest I suggest the excellent pythontesting.net.

HTH!

[philfreo]

Thanks

Overall I would suggest still adding a bit more of an explanation to https://pytest.org/latest/faq.html#how-does-pytest-relate-to-nose-and-unittest, outlining some of the major features/differences

[nicoddemus]

Thanks for the suggestion. I created a separate issue in #1477, so I'm closing this one for now. 😁