Failures and Verbosity

[David E. Wheeler]

On Feb 21, 2009, at 4:32 PM, David E. Wheeler wrote:

>> A good start would be to summarise exactly which options we have and
>> what they do; it's obviously become complex enough that none of us
>> remembers what all of them do - which doesn't bode well for anyone
>> else being able to use them...
>
> I see:
>
>  * verbosity
>      1   verbose        Print individual test results to STDOUT.
>      0   normal
>     -1   quiet          Suppress some test output (mostly failures
>                         while tests are running).
>     -2   really quiet   Suppress everything but the tests summary.
>     -3   silent         Suppress everything.
>  * failures
>  * comments
>  * show_count
>  * errors
>  * directives
>
> Am I missing any?

So where do we want to go with this? Maybe a string argument? Or an  
array of strings? That way, we can specify levels pretty granularly.  
The various things to display include:

   * failures
   * comments
   * counts
   * errors
   * directives
   * summary

Do we need any more? You can specify them singly or as an array:

   show => 'failures',

   show => [qw(failures comments errors)],

Or you can use one of a few aliases that correspond to the old numeric  
levels, but now just act as aliases for the appropriate arrays of  
arguments:

   * verbose - [qw(failures comments counts errors directives)],
   * normal  - [qw(counts summary)],
   * quiet   - [qw(counts summary)],
   * quiet   - [qw(summary)],
   * silent  - [],

I'm not exactly sure what should be in each of these, but we should  
add keys for anything that's missing to make the appropriate arrays  
(for example, I added "summary").

Thoughts?

David