[TIP] py.test 1.0 release / remarks

[holger krekel]

Hi testing-in-python,

i am happy to announce the 1.0.0 py.test release: 

    http://tetamap.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/pylib-1-0-0

the new features are reasonably stable now - let me summarize 
a few distinctive ones maybe of interest to people
particularly interested into testing with python: 

* test function arguments ("funcargs"):  With this, python test 
  functions can name arguments and one writes factory functions to
  provide instances for such arguments.  These factory 
  functions now have many interaction possibilities, for example
  they can use helper methods to efficiently manage the life cycle of
  such fixture objects across the whole testing process.  Test function
  arguments also make test parametrization natural - one sinmply provides 
  several different argument instances, no changes to the test 
  function needed, no magic "yield" for generating tests anymore - 
  although 1.0 still allows them and of course also allows 
  traditional xUnit-style setup or even running unittest.py style tests. 

* plugins: it is now easy to write plugins by implementing one 
  or more of the 37 hooks which py.test calls to implement 
  the testing process. There are many examples, among them  
  the "oejskit" plugin which integrates testing of javascript 
  code in real-life browsers into a regular test run.  
  Apart from such separately distributed "cross-project" plugins 
  you can also write per-project plugins/extensions that lives
  with your testing code. 

* distributed testing: distributing test runs among Linux/OSX/Windows 
  hosts and across python-2.4 till python-2.6 interpreters 
  works reasonably stable now.  This means that you can easily 
  iron out test-module/function specific problems across a 
  variety of platforms, accelerating the change & test feedback cycle.  

* xfail: a new way to mark tests as "expected to fail" which
  means they run normally but are reported/counted specially. 
  This "xfail" mark is meant to mark missing / wrong implementation 
  rather than missing dependencies / wrong platforms for which one
  uses "skip".  Especially for larger test suites making 
  this distinction is very helpful. 

* IO-capturing: output of test functions is captured per-test, 
  by default including any output from sub processes. 
  This works on all platforms and also (now) interacts well 
  with the logging module without importing/using it itself so 
  there are no interferences. 

* pastebin: sends your test session output or individual test
  failures to the Pocoo pastebin service and prints out URLs. 
  Convenient for seemless IRC/messaging communication. 

Hope you find some of this interesting and let the issue tracker, 
the mailing list or me know of any issues or comments. 

cheers,
holger

-- 
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