On 12:17 pm, miles.chris@gmail.com wrote:
I'm simply curious as to whether it is safe for me to rely on a test runner other than "trial" to run the tests? I assume any magic (knowledge of deferreds) is within the twisted.trial.unittest.TestCase class and the "trial" command is simply another tool to discover and pretty print the results. From what I've seen, both "nosetests" and "trial" will produce the same report (although "trial" looks nicer :-). Or perhaps this wouldn't be the case if I needed to interact with the reactor?
There is an implicit, undocumented goal that tests written for trial should remain usable with other test runners. Recently, I filed a ticket because not even *I* know which test runners or how this is supposed to work. You can follow the discussion / resolution here:
http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/2739
Personally I'd never use nose because, as you say, trial looks nicer :), so I can only guess what's going wrong.
The potential problem (currently) with using Twisted's TestCase class together with other runners is that the tests do something that no other Twisted application does, and which is not _really_ supported by the framework: re-start the reactor repeatedly.
Eventually, 'trial' itself will not do this, and will behave as a "normal" Twisted application. 'trial' will, as stated by the ticket I just linked to, still support other test runners by having a 'run' method that starts and shuts down the reactor, but it won't be used internally. The main reason to do this is that there are various tools which would be nice to use Twisted functionality in-process with the tests for reporting results. Doing that will probably remain a trial- exclusive feature, because other test runners will necessarily need to completely shut down the reactor at the end of each test.