Nose is deprecated

[wiredfool]

http://nose.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Nose is deprecated, and it has a couple of failure modes that are kind of annoying. We should look at possible replacements that handle our needs:

• Parallel execution
• coverage
• unittest2 based

[hugovk]

A couple of candidates, nose2 and pytest.

thing	nose2	pytest
parallel execution	yes	yes
coverage	yes	yes
unittest2 based	yes	yes
monthly pip installs	49,942	1,878,740
GH stars	401	1,822
GH forks	94	484

By "unittest2 based", I assume you mean it can find and run tests written using the unittest module for Python 2.7 and later (unittest2 being the backport for 2.6 and earlier).

Our tests are all written in plain unittest, nose is only used as the runner, so it should be easy enough to switch to either.

[wiredfool]

Unittest based implying that we can just use the existing tests without porting.

[hugovk]

Fixed by #2911.