A user installed roundup using: pip install roundup.

Then following the request in the install doc to change to the source directory and run 
pytest, he went to the installation directory and ran pytest.

This failed for a few reasons:

  1) he was in the install directory and never had a source directory for comparison.
  2) this confusion was enhanced by the presence of a test directory in the install
     directory to allow people to use pytest in an installed tracker.
  3) the install directory has a file called token.py. By running pytest from
     the install directory token.py masked /usr/lib/python.../token.py causing pytest
     to crash massively.

So a few things here:

In the request to run pytest, better define a source directory.
Also earlier in the document it says:

   assumes that you are using the source distribution

this needs to be defined better both here and in the

  Problems? Testing your Python...

section. Also adding a statement that the roundup source directory does not include
the file token.py or some other way to prevent the confusion would be helpful for new
users.

I don't think renaming token.py is needed, nor to rename the test directory.
Doing the first would have prevented pytest from crashing before it started a test.
Doing the second (along with the first) would have resulted in pytest reporting there
was no test directory.

I think either one of these would have resulted in a confused user and an email as the
primary failure was the misunderstanding about where the tests can be run.

Note in:

 changeset:   7178:db06d4aeb978
 changeset:   7181:6971c9249c6d

move roundup/token.py to rtoken.py to prevent shadowing
of the system token.py.

Fixed in changeset:   7374:72de757edf78

Also the reason for the token.py to rtoken.py change is:

  This bites me every now and again when running pytest and pdb. Some
  submodules want to load the stdlib python and end up getting roundup's
  python and thing break with N_TOKENS not defined etc.

So not directly related to the reason for this ticket,
but it does change the initial problem symptoms.