>
> On 16 Jul 2024, at 1:36, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
>
> > I like this idea. I would want it to have behaviour that
> > --lf=failed.txt checks if the file exists and if not populates it with
> > the contents from the pytest ---lf cache. Then you could do:
> >
> > $ pytest
> > < runts tests, some fail >
> > $ pytest --lf=failed=txt
> > < file doesn't exist so save last-failed there (from
> > .pytest_cache/last_failed) and run the failed tests >
> > $ pytest --lf=failed.txt
> > < file exists now so run tests specified in the file >
>
> Doing this based on the existence of the file causes a problem in my opinion. Let's say I ran this before at some point and the file exists with an old set of tests. Now I run the test suite and got new failures I want to store. I forget to remove the file and run with --lf=failed.txt. Now the old set of tests is used, the new set is gone and I have to re-run the whole suite, which is exactly what I wanted to prevent in the first place.
There is always the possibility that you forget and run the wrong
command. The downside of a stateful interface is that running the
wrong command once potentially means you can't just fix the command
and rerun. But --lf is already stateful and that is actually useful in
practice because it means you can decide whether to use --lf after
having seen the failures.
You could also say that when run as --lf=failed.txt if the file exists
then the cache doesn't get cleared. Then a subsequent run with --lf or
--lf=failed2.txt still recovers the failing tests from the previous
full run.
All the discussion made me realize that perhaps we do not need something attached to `--lf` specifically, just a new flag (or something) to collect tests based on the summary output of a `-ra` run. Then the user is free to execute with `--lf` or even `--sw`.
Bruno.