I'm in the process of writing a python module that includes some samples. These samples aren't unit-tests, and they are too long and complex to be doctests. I'm interested in best practices for automatically checking that these samples run.

My current project layout is pretty standard, except that there is an extra top level makefile that has build, install, unittest, coverage and profile targets, that delegate responsibility to setup.py and nose as required.

projectname/
    Makefile
    README
    setup.py
    samples/
        foo-sample
        foobar-sample
    projectname/
        __init__.py
        foo.py
        bar.py
    tests/
        test-foo.py
        test-bar.py

I've considered adding a sampletest module, or adding nose.tools.istest decorators to the entry-point functions of the samples, but for a small number of samples, these solutions sound a bit ugly.

This question is similar to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/301365/automatically-unit-test-example-code, but I assume python best practices will differ from C#