Sysadmins have a habit of accumulating little personal scripts to makeour lives more convenient, often things that make perfect sense to usbut are too peculiar or specific to be worth installing generally.Since these are personal hacks, they're often bashed together in verycasual ways; if it mostly works for us, it's good enough.

From personal experience, I now have a suggestion for these scripts:make sure that they have clear or at least comprehensible errormessages, not little cryptic ones. If you do

A while back I wrote about how I monkey-patch Python modules fortesting , selectively replacing variousfunctions they provide with test ones that return the results I like.But it's not the only way to do this. If monkey-patching system modulesthis way makes you nervous (perhaps due to its potential side effects),there's another way to do it: you can entirely replace the system moduleitself in the module you're testing.

After all, import ed modules are (more or