I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog ……

Sorry for taking so long to reply, I’ve been updating testlink-plugin (which also uses/supports TAP documentation.

I went with TAP. I thought about implementing an abstraction layer and adding support to both test protocols. However as SubUnit has no current port for Java, it was too hard to accomplish. Check the result here: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/TAP+Plugin.

I created a sample project in github (https://github.com/kinow/nose_and_subunit). If you execute in the src folder ‘nosetests –with-subunit’ having the modules nose, subunit and nose-subunit, then you will have an SubUnit output containing the the following:

time: 2011-10-12 04:12:50.431871Z
test: test_me.test_b
failure: test_me.test_b [
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nose-1.1.2-py2.7.egg/nose/case.py", line 197, in runTest
    self.test(*self.arg)
  File "/home/kinow/python/workspace/nose_and_subunit/src/test_me.py", line 4, in test_b
    assert a[0] == 'c'
AssertionError
]
time: 2011-10-12 04:12:50.433577Z

This was the closest that I could get to testing your hypothesis. Nose and nose-subunit control how the SubUnit stream is generated, thus I’m not able to put a ‘[‘ as first character in a line, at least I think so

I’m very happy that you liked the comparison, I looked for something similar on Internet and thought it was a shame when I found nothing.

I will add the part about diagnostics with ‘#’ to the post, hope you don’t mind. Thanks for the heads up!

in tap4j each comment belongs to the entity on its left. So a line with a comment will be just a loose comment Perhaps a future feature in tap4j.

Thanks for your comment!

Your comparison table together with
the examples is very helpful. Thanks.

What does syntactically happen in the SubUnit example when the Traceback example message itself would contain a closing bracket as first character of a line? How is that unbalanced bracket nesting parsed?

To complement the TAP example with similar diagnistics you can use comment lines, starting with ‘#’, e.g.:

1..2
ok – foo
ok – bar
# Traceback (most recent call last):
# File “/src/my_test.py”, line 11,
# in runTest self.assertEqual [...
# ] <– some lonely bracket
# AssertionError: Wrong length

In TAP consumers like TAP::DOM
comment lines sematically belong to the
respective ok line just before it. However,
it's not strictly a semantical standard.

Ok, that just my 2 cents.

Thanks again for the comparison of TAP vs. SubUnit.

Renormalist