TST: require unittest2 for testing on Python 2.6?

[shoyer]

There are some nice improvements available in the unittest module on Python 2.7 or later that aren't available on Python 2.6 without using the unittest2 library. In particular, I miss using assertRaises as a context manager and skiptest.

How about adding the module as a testing requirement on Python 2.6?

[jreback]

see pandas.util.testing

usually just

with tm.assertRaises(..):
....

[jreback]

raise nose.SkipTest(...)

[shoyer]

Yes, we have work arounds, but they are certainly more awkward without using the standard backport. Is it that bad to add a testing dependency?

[jreback]

then we have 2 ways of doing it

if u want to fix all the occurrences and then remove it from the compat file would be ok
not sure how complicated that would be

this is a long standing issue - much of the testing infrastructure was done before the fixes existed

so can be changed but each of the work around should be fixed in their entirety to avoid even more work arounds

[jorisvandenbossche]

See also #7718, if we would drop 2.6 support, then the dependency problem is solved?
But of course, cleaning up all tests to use this is still the big work.

[jreback]

iirc all of the major projects still support 2.6
anybody dropping it yet?
we had his discussion wrt to 3.2
support was trivial and no one else has dropped (except patsy) i think
note that conda supports all except 3.2 (and that's how we r building)