[py-dev] [proposal] extended information collection

[holger krekel]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 12:54 +0200, Ronny Pfannschmidt wrote:
> Recently i noticed a new need.
> 
> The collecting/asserting various kinds of data during a testrun.
> 
> I noticed the following (partially hpyothetical) cases in various
> projects
> 
> * pip records file changes to the virtualenv it makes for testing
> * pypy records jit compile results/dumps
> * jinja2 should record asts and the compile results of templates it
> tests
> * the logcapture extension
> * the build-in io captureing 
> 
> i think i would be helpful/practical to have a common way to record
> those things and navigate them in extended test reporters

Not sure how you can uniformly present a user-interface
to navigate such data.  

> adding propper timing information to lines/data could help even more
> (for having a common timeline of different event sources)
> 
> since this topic is rather hard to manage i hope for some dicussion on
> the needs others see, as well as if/how this could add more to the
> testing

Maybe a simple storage & query mechanism for test-run related data could help.
I never got around to implement this. It would provide useful to allow features
like "run the last failing test from a previous py.test cmdline invocation"
and to generate html reports from subsequent revisions of a project where we
do a test-run for each revision and later query the result storage. 
This should be easily implementable as a plugin.

best,
holger