Redesign

I decided to (had to) redesign the test runner, this time cutting more directly to the root of matters, overriding select methods of unittest classes.

Before, in subprocess mode, I was calling the individual test modules, which would in turn run unittest.main() with all the attendant pains of cmd line options conflicting and output parsing. (we have to add profiling, exclusion by tags etc). One major design change I made was to unify the single / subprocess modes to use one test runner, (test_runner.py).

In it, along with a lot of utility functions, is defined a run_test() function. It takes a list of modules and an options object as arguments. It compiles a dictionary of the test results and on completion either returns the dict or in subprocess mode pretty prints it to stdout. (This is then eval'd for an all_results.update(result))

RESULTS_TEMPLATE = {
    'output'     :  '',         # unittest.TextTestRunner output
    'stderr'     :  '',         # stderr outpout 
    'stdout'     :  '',         # stdout output
    'num_tests'  :   0,         # taken directly from the unittest results object
    'failures'   :  [],         # ditto
    'errors'     :  [],         # ditto
}

In single process mode run_tests.py just imports from test_runner.py run_test() function and passes it the optparse options object and list of modules to search for tests.

Both run_tests.py and test_runner.py, share the same optparse cmd line parser options. In subprocess mode, run_tests.py calls test_runner.py with essentialy the same sys.argv it was initiated with. if __main__ it runs the run_test() function on a list of [args[0]]. Now all the extra functionality and cmd line parsing is all in one place.

There were quite a few extra little changes that have made it not perfect but a lot better. Adding exclution by tagging functionality took 10 minutes, most of the time being spent on picking a format.

|Tags:display|

Adding profiling decorators or whatever other functionality is desired will also be a lot easier now.