RFE: move away from deprecated nose (to pytest?)

[sanjayankur31]

Feature

nose is deprecated, so it'll be good to move to another testing tool, perhaps py.test.

Motivation

nose is deprecated upstream (the last commit was in 2016.) and is also being deprecated in Fedora.

https://github.com/nose-devs/nose/commits/master

It is still in use in the repo but only to run tests, so moving to pytests should be quite simple here.

The nose website says:

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

"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."

Deprecation of nose in Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DeprecateNose

Alternatives
py.test or nose2 (but nose2 doesn't seem to be at par with nose or py.test)

[Lykos153]

Absolutely! I've had moving to py.test in the back of my mind for a while but... well, time.

[yarikoptic]

I would vote for pytest. Let us know if you need help. Time goes and nose is getting actively deprecated in distributions e.g. Debian

[sanjayankur31]

There are helper tools like this one that may reduce the workload, but it really depends on how advanced the nose usage here is:

https://github.com/pytest-dev/nose2pytest

[yarikoptic]

done in #80