On 29 July 2018 at 03:20, Tim Golden <mail@timgolden.me.uk> wrote:
I think that was my starting point: rather than develop increasingly involved and still somewhat brittle mechanisms, why not do what you'd naturally do with a new test and use tempfile? I was expecting someone to come forward to highlight some particular reason why the TESTFN approach is superior, but apart from a reference to the possibly cost of creating a new temporary file per test, no-one really has.
For higher level modules, "just use tempfile to create a new temporary directory, then unlink it at the end" is typically going to be a good answer (modulo the current cleanup issues that Jeremy is reporting, but ideally those will be fixed rather than avoided, either by improving the way the module is being used, or fixing any underlying defects). For lower level modules though, adding a test suite dependency on tempfile introduces a non-trivial chance of adding an operational dependency from a module's test suite back to the module itself. When that happens, module regressions may show up as secondary failures in tempfile that then need to be debugged, rather than as specific unit test failures that point you towards exactly what you broke. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia