Run 'fast' tests only

[takluyver]

Running the test suite takes a couple of minutes. It would be handy to have a simple option to run only a subset of the tests in a fraction of that time. At a first pass, this could be everything except IPython.parallel.

[minrk]

I've wanted this for years (the twisted-based parallel tests were even slower than they are now).

A pattern that makes sense to me would be iptest does everything normal (exclude zmq, parallel), and iptest --all does everything.

[fperez]

Note that nose supports tagging of tests, numpy already uses that facility to tag specific slow tests. If it's an entire group of tests that's particularly slow we may instead omit whole groups, but I'd prefer tagging the slowest ones individually, so that even 'fast' runs provide at least some minimal coverage of all the pieces.

[minrk]

There are a few slow tests outside parallel, but since each parallel test creates and destroys a client, that is the bulk of the total time.

[fperez]

It's possible (though I'm not sure) that the nose tag mechanism could be applied to whole modules conveniently (the text exclusion tags do work at the function, class and module level). We need to look into that one.

[takluyver]

The docs about tagging tests are here. It talks about tagging all the tests in a class, but not in a module or package.

[Carreau]

Test time has been divided by 2. Is it enough to close this issue of do you want to cut more test ?

[takluyver]

That was the intention of this, I just forgot the closes message in the commit. Closing now.