Why can't confest be a directory?

[ofer-pd]

My repository looks something like this:

app1/
app2/
core/
jobs/
tests/
    conftest.py
    app1/
    app2/
    core/
    jobs/
    tests/
utils/

The structure inside tests/ mirrors the structure of the repo, making it easy to keep tests organized and find the tests for a particular bit of code. For example, if I have a module utils/parsing.py, then the tests for that will be in tests/utils/test__parsing.py.

However, I have a lot of fixtures and homebrew test tools that are currently all shoved into conftest.py, which is now way too long and crowded.

I don't want to create a tests/utils/ or tests/lib/ folder inside tests/ for that code because that violates the namespace - if tests/utils/ contains utilities for testing, there where do I put the tests for my utils/ code? The tests that currently live in tests/utils/?

There's only one name in the tests/ namespace that is explicitly for the purpose of storing code to aid in testing, and that's conftest.py. So why not allow me to expand that into a directory?

app1/
app2/
core/
jobs/
tests/
    conftest/
        __init__.py
        client.py
        fixtures.py
        factories.py
        ...
    app1/
    app2/
    core/
    jobs/
    tests/
utils/

[ofer-pd]

FYI - In the meantime, I'm going to use tests/_lib/.