formatter API and subclassing pain points

[Andy Armstrong]

On 11 Sep 2007, at 11:49, Andy Armstrong wrote:
>> Where the line with the numbers gets no \n, but that means $jobs+1  
>> (or
>> +2) new lines of output every time a test completes.
>
> Parallel test runs are a clearly good thing; mandatory to make
> efficient use of multiple cores. So maybe we need to understand and
> embrace parallelism in the formatter? For some formatters it won't
> matter much whether the results arrive in order; for others -
> including the console formatter - it's critical.

Actually the formatter already has nearly the right interface to  
support parallel tests.

We have

$formatter->prepare        # Called before any testing
$formatter->before_test    # At the start of a test script
$formatter->result         # For each result
$formatter->after_test     # At the end of a test script
$formatter->summary        # At the end of the entire test run

If before_test became open_test - and returned an opaque handle that  
we then passed to result and after_test (renamed as close_test) then  
the interface quite tidily supports multiple concurrent tests.

Does that help Eric? Do you need to generate any output that wouldn't  
fit within that scheme?

-- 
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net