It seems to me that we need to clean up the .coverage hidden files created by nosetest or else nosetest would be confused when I try to run it a second time. It may return cached results in the .coverage file.

The reason I say that is I run nosetests --with-coverage --cover-package=.. It creates .coverage. Then I modify my unittests (e.g. remove an entire test), and I rerun nosetest. I expect the coverage to go down, but it doesn't. That seems wrong.

Next, I remove the .coverage hidden file. Rerun nosetest again, and I see that coverage did go down.

So, do I need to remove .coverage files?

Is there a standard procedure to clean up the .coverage files? Just call rm? Or is there a more correct way? Or is there a way to run nosetest so that it forces a retest instead of reading the .coverage files?