[RFC] change test output to subunit when stdout is a pipe

[Martin Pool]

2009/7/20 Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net>:
> I've noticed that these days I always do the following two things at the
> same time, or not at all:
> bzr selftest --subunit
> bzr selftest > tests.log
>
> by which I mean, I never record test output except in subunit format,
> and I never [interactively] use subunit format except when recording
> test output.
>
> Would anyone object to a heuristic in bzr selftest to use subunit format
> when stdout is a pipe?

I do record it in the default format.

At the moment subunit format has an external dependency.  Users run
bzr selftests and report the results.  I would think twice before
making that harder.  (Though installing one more Python module is not
that much harder, so not out of the question.)

Would it be reasonable to just always use it?  I thought it was meant
to be human readable, so would it be reasonable to use subunit format
always, or could we use a reasonable variation of it that eg only
includes failures?

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>