Run examples as part of test run

[mjallday]

It's too easy to break the examples and not know about it.

[julianpistorius]

I've run into this problem with the examples before. I'll have a look at it. Any suggestions on how the examples could be run as part of the test suite?

[mjallday]

We can either enumerate all the files in the directory and run them then check for return code == 0 or rewrite the examples to be importable (e.g. if __name__ == 'main': run_example()).

I think the first is probably less work so doing it that way would be easier.

On the test side I think something like

import subprocess, sys
class ExampleTests(TestCase):
    def test_examples_run(self):
         for example_file_name in example_dir_files:
              self.assertEqual(subprocess.call( sys.executeable + " " + example_file_name, shell=True), 0)

this is probably a pretty naive implementation but it has the general idea right.

hat tip to @coderanger for the sys.executable move.