Hi Alexandre!

First of all, thanks for your hard work on porting the packages away from
nose.

On Wed, Sep 18, 2024 at 12:32:33PM +0200, Alexandre Detiste wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> While fixing/updating more random packages for the python3-nose removal;
> I stumbled on this new fork:
> 
>     https://pypi.org/project/pynose/

Yes, I saw that too. By the way, there is also another fork called nose3, but
it seems even less active.

> This fork brings it's own new problems:
>   - licensing needs extensive review:
> https://github.com/mdmintz/pynose/issues/36
>   - unit test are gone: https://github.com/mdmintz/pynose/issues/39
> 
> So I am not convinced it's the way to go;
> It still feels like too little, too late.

I agree.

> Kicking Nose out of Debian (+ Ubuntu) would
> maybe make some projects reconsider their CI pipeline
> to use a better maintained test runner.

That’s a nice side effect, but not more. I think the primary motivation for
removal is maintenance burden, e.g. the fact that nose often breaks with new
Python versions.

If we worked around some of the problems (e.g. replaced 2to3 with fissix),
I am fine with giving the maintainers (and their upstreams) more time to port
away from nose.

Also, many upstream projects are using Ubuntu LTS releases, and the next such
release is only in 1.5 years anyway.

> python3-pika is the first project I found online that did switched to pynose
> as prefered test runner in upcoming release.

It looks like it needs [py]nose only for two relatively small functions from
nose.twistedtools. I wonder why they didn’t just vendor that code.

> Debian Code Search also hints to:
>   - django-cte (it's on the todo list too)

This one I don’t see why needs nose at all. The test is very simple and just
calls init_db() and destroy_db(), this can be definitely done with pure
unittest.

>   - thunderbird
>   https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=pynose&literal=1&perpkg=1

We don’t seem to run Python tests during Thunderbird build.

So for now, I am not convinced that we need to update nose package to pynose
upstream. However, if pynose has some patches that help us, we can always
cherry-pick them (maybe after updating debian/copyright).

That said, https://bugs.debian.org/1080224 is not fixed in pynose. Or at
least the problematic line is still there:
https://github.com/mdmintz/pynose/blob/v1.5.2/nose/commands.py#L122

--
Dmitry Shachnev

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