Q:

How to distribute and execute platform-specific unit tests?

We have a python project that we want to start testing using buildbot. Its unit tests include tests that should only work on some platforms. So, we've got tests that should pass on all platforms, tests that should only run on 1 specific platform, tests that should pass on platforms A, B, C and tests that pass on B and D.
What is the best way of doing this? Simple suites would be a hassle, since, as described, each test can have a different list of target platforms. I thought about adding "@run_on" and "@ignore_on" decorators that would match platforms to test methods. Is there anything better?

A:

We've decided to go with decorators that, using platform module and others, check whether the tests should be executed, and if not simply let it pass (though, we saw that python2.7 already has in its trunk a SkipTest exception that could be raised in such cases, to ignore the test).

