Tests that print stuff

Tests that print stuff to stdout or stderr annoy me.  They make a successful test run much less satisfying to watch, and they clutter logs when you are trying to debug a failure.

Launchpad has quite a few tests that print stuff.  I was going to fix them up today, but I’ve got a Launchpad branch in progress and I’ve promised myself that I’ll have only one in progress at a time. Besides, the build is broken.

Anyway, I’ve written a quick hack that lets you analyze a subunit stream to see which tests print stuff.

To get a subunit stream including the output itself:

$ gzip -dc testtools-experiment-r11753.subunit.gz | grep -v time: |  python tests-with-output.py

To get a list of the tests:

$ gzip -dc testtools-experiment-r11753.subunit.gz |  python tests-with-output.py  | subunit-ls --no-passthrough

For those interested, Launchpad has roughly one hundred such tests.

As with my last post, I’m left with the feeling that subunit is great but needs a lot more polish.  I guess my next step is to figure out how to upstream these.