[pytest-dev] Is it valid to use --boxed with --capture=no?

[David Röthlisberger]

Hi Holger, thanks for your quick response.

> > Is it valid to use --boxed with --capture=no? It fails with
> > UnicodeEncodeError. More details at
> > https://bitbucket.org/hpk42/pytest/issue/573
>
> In any case, could you please update the issue using the latest 
> pytest-2.6.3 and pytest-xdist-1.11?

Done. The issue remains the same.


> Do you need to timestamp the captured output as one big thing or per line?

I add a timestamp to each line, similar to the "ts" utility from
moreutils[1] but in-process in python.

I do this by "dup2"ing stdout & stderr to a a named pipe. There's a
thread reading from the pipe, timestamping each line and writing it to
a logfile.

[1] http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/ts.1.html


> Could you give a somewhat real-life example of what you would like to
> customize in a pytest run?

This may be more detail than you care about, but here goes:

Stb-tester tests set-top boxes by capturing video from the set-top box
(using video-capture hardware) and sending infrared signals to the
set-top box (using a usb infrared emitter). The user's tests are written
in python.

With pytest I have a function-scope fixture that passes in an object
that the user's test can use to access the video-processing and
infrared-control functions.

For each test run I also make a video recording of the set-top box's
output. The timestamps in the log allow the user to correlate the logs
to particular points in the video.

The user can also capture other logs during a test run (for example logs
from processes running on the set-top box itself) so the timestamps are
also necessary to correlate these logs with stb-tester's logs of what
the test script is doing.

I'd like to be able to capture (and timestamp) any stdout & stderr
output written by the user's script. If this turns out to be too hard I
could provide the user's script a function like "stb_tester.log(...)"
which does the timestamping and writes to a file, but that would be an
incompatible break for my users -- their scripts currently use "print"
for logging, and unless they change their scripts that logging would be
lost when they upgrade stb-tester to the new version that uses pytest.

I need to use "--boxed" to run each test in a different process, because
very occasionally I get segfaults from the video-capture and
image-processing libraries that I use, and I don't want that to bring
down the rest of the tests.

Cheers,
Dave.