“python3 -m test”和“python3 -m unittest”之间的区别

Question

I found out that I can discover and run unit tests under my directory tree by doing this:

python3 -m test

The above works, but the documented method to discover and run all tests finds hundreds more, including a new one that was not found by the previous method:

python3 -m unittest

What exactly is -m test and why can't I find documentation on it after a quick search, except the following page which seems to be about CPython?

https://devguide.python.org/runtests/

Answer 1

The test package is intended to test the Python API itself. According to the documentation:

Note: The test package is meant for internal use by Python only. It is documented for the benefit of the core developers of Python. Any use of this package outside of Python's standard library is discouraged as code mentioned here can change or be removed without notice between releases of Python.

The link to this documentation appears in the TOC under Development Tools . While it is not entirely surprising that the python3 -m test command discovers and runs tests, it is not really designed to discover and run the tests that you write for your own code.