Nose is unmaintained and we need to switch [RFC]

[diegogangl]

According to the Nose website:

Nose has been in maintenance mode for the past several years and will likely cease without a new person/team to take over maintainership. New projects should consider using Nose2, py.test, or just plain unittest/unittest2.

https://nose.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Well this has certainly happened, nose doesn't work anymore with Python 3.10. Fedora has already switched to it in 35, so I just got hit by this. Making the tests run with Python 3.9 while 3.10 is the default makes the gi module fail for some reason, so that's also not an option.

The question is whether we should switch to Nose2 (easier?) or move to Pytest (nicer?). Or use something different altogether

[Neui]

I am not really in the python ecosystem, so I don't really have a preference (yet). Pytest has a page about using nose tests which could make it easier to migrate, but looking at nose2 vs nose differences it seems nose2 may just (mostly) work with our existing tests (haven't really dealt with them yet).

I have a small (paused) python project myself, but looking at the test I mainly just use unittest it seems, and I think I just ran whatever setup.py test (or something like that?) does...

[diegogangl]

Pytest has a page about using nose tests which could make it easier to migrate

That's a great find! They even have a migration script, might try that out later