1. In the Developers' Guide http://www.sagemath.org/doc/developer/conventions.html regarding optional doctests it says
"Mark a doctest as optional if it requires optional packages; even better, mark it as optional - PKG_NAME if it requires the package PKG_NAME." I think this is not strong enough, and should be changed to "If a doctest requires the package PKG_NAME to run, mark it as optional using "optional - PKG_NAME". THE PKG_NAME should be the basename for the optional package, not the full name which includes a release date." The main point here is to make it compusory to have the spkg name as well as the tag "optional". Do you agree? If so, the Guide needs editing. 2. I would find it useful to have a flag which does the reverse of "optional", say "not-if-optional" to tag a doctest which gets run if the optional spkg is not installed but not if it is. In case this seems odd, the optional spkg I have in mind is database_cremona_ellcurve which consists entirely of data, not code, and we are always running into situations where tests behave differently depending on whether or not the optional databse is installed. It would be good to have both. In my own testing I keep on having to uninstall the optional database, which is tedious as it is automatic (though it only involves deleting two files in this case). Does anyone else think this would a useful additional feature? John -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
