From: Nathaniel Talbott <nathaniel@...>
Date: 2002-04-03T23:27:32+09:00
Subject: RE: Test::Unit GUI suggestion (was Re: Test::Unit GTk GUI)

Nat Pryce [mailto:nat.pryce@b13media.com] wrote:

> How about Test::Unit only providing two TestRunner implementations 
> which both write to the console.  One generates human readable output 
> that concentrates on being easy to read and only shows the results of 
> failures. The other generates verbose output that is easy to parse, 
> but describes the result of each test that is excecuted.
> 
> GUI "test runners" would then spawn a Ruby process to execute the 
> machine-friendly test runner, parse the output from that process, and 
> show it graphically.  The spawning/parsing process could be wrapped 
> into a class with a similar API to the existing test runner classes.  
> By spawning a separate Ruby process, each test run would start with a 
> clean set of classes.  An additional advantage of this approach is 
> that Test::Unit suites could more easily be integrated into
> non-Ruby APIs such as Visual Studio or Eclipse.

This is a good idea, and you're not the first to suggest it. However,
when I've looked at doing it in the past, I've always found the devil to
be in the details. Communicating between two separate Ruby process is
hard to do in a way that works across platforms. Currently, I'm happy
enough with the console test runner that this is not a priority for me,
but if someone else wants to send me a robust, cross-platform solution,
I'd be more than happy to fit it in to the core.


Nathaniel

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