unittests are really part of the build, not a special run

[Leandro Lucarella via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 23:26:38 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>>> And if you suggest to build both test and normal build as 
>>> part of single
>>> compiler call (building test version silently in the 
>>> background) this is
>>> also very confusing addition hardly worth its gain.
>>
>> Making the format of unittest failures better would take us a 
>> long way. Then we can script builds so the unittest and 
>> release build are created concurrently.
>
> If it is only format that matters you an always change it via 
> custom test runner. For example, we do have a test runner that 
> generates JUnit-compatible XML output for Jenkins - and that 
> was possible to do with plain `unittest` blocks even with D1 :)
>
> Main problem with changing default formatting is that it is 
> pretty hard to choose one that is 100% right. Current one is at 
> least simple and predictable being just an exception printout.

I think having the default using the same format as compiler 
errors makes perfect sense. Providing extra formatters in Phobos, 
would be a huge gain, like a JUnit-compatible formatter, as it's 
a very widespread test reporting format that can be used with 
many tools.

I agree the key is the current configurability, but providing 
better default and better out of the box alternatives seems like 
a very reasonable approach to me.