[py-dev] Autoactive fixtures

[Floris Bruynooghe]

On 6 October 2012 00:02, holger krekel <holger at merlinux.eu> wrote:
> Hi Floris,
>
> On Fri, Oct 05, 2012 at 23:42 +0100, Floris Bruynooghe wrote:
>> Hi Holger,
>>
>> One nice feature of the funcarg/setup merge into fixture is that you
>> can now return a value from an autoactive fixture and request it
>> anywhere else.  I didn't think of this before but this is surprisingly
>> useful as it provides a great alternative to storing things on e.g.
>> session or item objects.
>
> Yes, i think so too.
>
>> However one issue I discovered is that is possible for a user to
>> accidentally override an autoactive fixture.  If you create a fixture
>> with an identical name to the autoactive one it will be lost.  I think
>> this can be problematical for plugins.
>
> Hum, indeed, we have a global namespace for fixtures and unintentionally
> shadowing plugin from project specific fixtures is easy.
>
>> What do you think the correct behaviour should be?  I realise changing
>> this could be hard/ugly.
>
> Not sure it's hard. first we need an idea what to do :)
>
> Hum. We could error out on the definition of fixtures if they already exist -
> unless a flag aka "i know what i am doing" (e.g. override=True) is supplied.

That would not be as nice in the normal case.  I do tend to extend
funcargs quite a lot in my test suites.  Although I guess it's not a
horrible thing, it would have to default to override=True when using
the backwards compatible pytest_funcarg__ syntax which then kind of
defeats the point.

Or are you proposing to only need this for overriding autoactive fixtures?