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Support console output - Switch to Kaocha?

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#49 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
clojure
Domain
testing, tooling

Research direction

Start with Kaocha's capture_output plugin documentation and its Babashka compatibility notes, then compare those capabilities with the current test-runner setup. A completed change would support console output and preserve non-random test ordering while retaining Babashka compatibility; validate it with the existing test run.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I was looking into what it would take to support printing console output, since this is a common thing people try to do and currently makes the whole test run error without any meaningful message.

While searching for how to capture stdout during a test run, I stumbled upon this: https://github.com/lambdaisland/kaocha/blob/main/doc/plugins/capture_output.md

In other words, it supports that out of the box. And from the looks of it, I think I would rather just use Kaocha than figure out how to do that with our current setup.

I had previously looked into Kaocha when I was choosing a testing framework, and it has another compelling advantage: It has an option to not randomize the testing order, which is exactly what we need!

So why didn't I decide to use it? Because it ran on the JVM, so it was worth avoiding it to gain the quick startup time of Babashka.

This had the unfortunate side effect of me having to actually parse the test files in order to determine the order they are defined, simply to defeat the behavior of clojure.test randomizing the test runs. It's kind of ridiculous, actually, but I couldn't figure out any other way to do it.

But now, Kaocha is compatible with Babashka, so it ticks all of the boxes.

Dominant language
Clojure
Stars
2
Forks
10
Avg merge
10m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

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First steps

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  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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