Hi All,

Line 355 of this code on the 2.6 branch and trunk:

http://svn.python.org/view/python/branches/release26-
maint/Lib/doctest.py?view=annotate
http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/doctest.py?annotate=69012

...contain a check that doesn't work cross platform.

I'd argue that the check is worthless and should be removed.
I'm happy to do this, but is this code tested?
If not, do I need to add a test when I remove those two lines?

cheers,

Chris

How about removing it and seeing if tests fail?

Hmm, I don't think tests will fail, however, there are cryptic docs for this...

http://docs.python.org/library/doctest.html#basic-api

I don't really get what module_relative is about and I've always run into the non-
cross-platform issue above when passing an absolute path to DocFileSuite while 
forgetting to specify module_relative=False.

The weird/frustrating thing is that the tests behave *just fine* on Windows with 
module_relative being the default of True and the absolute path being specified, so 
I'm not really sure what difference either the module_relative option or the check 
that the path doesn't start with a / mean...

The problem is that while the docs specify that paths must be /-separated, nothing 
in the code enforces this. 

So, with module_relative as True, the default:

- If you generate and pass an absolute path on Windows, it'll work just fine. 

- If you pass a '\\'-separated module-relative path, this will work just fine.
  (You'll end up with base/dir\path\you\supplied, but I doubt `open` will care about 
that.

With module_relative set to False, I'm not really sure what happens...

Anyone?

Sure doctests should be crossplatform by default when possible. The patch should fix the behavior for windows. It also cleans the doc and code a bit.

Can you provide some testcases?

http://codereview.appspot.com/815042/show

Patch looks good.  One error and style suggestions on rietveld.

What this patch doesn't appear to address is that there doesn't appear to be any point to module_relative. Can anyone clarify what the intention of this option is? (it doesn't appear to have any meaningful point from my experience...)

The revision you linked to seems to say that Georg was the one who added this code.

> The revision you linked to seems to say that Georg was the one who
> added this code.

Can you elaborate?  Line 355 in trunk was last edited by "edloper".

I misread the Subversion viewer, it was actually PJE in r45248 (if I read correctly this time :)

No, I only consolidated the two copies of the code to a single function, in order to more easily add the PEP 302 support.  The feature was already there.