[New-bugs-announce] [issue8074] Fail-fast behavior for unittest

[Cliff Dyer]

New submission from Cliff Dyer <jcd at sdf.lonestar.org>:

When a long suite of tests is running, it would be nice to be able to exit out early to see the results of the tests that have run so far.  

I would like to see a couple of features included in `unittest` to this effect that have recently been implemented in django's test runner.  The first exits gracefully on `^C`, the second allows the user to specify a `--failfast` option, which causes the test runner to exit after the first failure or error, rather than proceeding with the 

If you hit `^C`, rather than exit with a stack trace of whatever was happening at the time, `unittest` should complete the current test, and then exit with the results to that point.  A second `^C` would be treated as a normal `KeyboardInterrupt`, in case that last test were somehow running on too long.

{{{
  $ python test_module.py
..F.s.^C <Test run halted by Ctrl-C> x
======================================================================
FAIL: test_multiline_equal (__main__.MyTest)
Unicode objects return diffs on failure
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test_test.py", line 39, in test_multiline_equal
    self.assertEqual(original, revised)
AssertionError: 
- Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, 
?             ^
+ Lorem ipsum color sit amet, 
?             ^
              consectetur adipisicing elit, 
+             that's the way the cookie crumbles,
              sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 7 tests in 12.010s

FAILED (failures=1, skipped=1, expected failures=1)
}}}

A `failfast` option could be specified as a keyword argument to `unittest.main()`, or `unittest.main()` could read it off the command line, according to the same mechanism used by, e.g., the `verbosity` option.

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 100493
nosy: jcd
severity: normal
status: open
title: Fail-fast behavior for unittest
type: feature request
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.1, Python 3.2, Python 3.3

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue8074>
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