[Zope-Coders] Testing from an INSTANCE_HOME

[Chris Withers]

Stefan H. Holek wrote:
> I have shipped tests to customers. I have no way of "upgrading" those 
> tests after the fact.

You can ship them patches.

>>> Simply have Testing communicate the directory to Zope.App.startup() 
>>> by other means, say, an environment variable named TESTING_HOME. I 
>>> have tried this already and could provide code.
>>
>> Please! Not another environment variable :-(
> 
> Well, this one would be secret of course ;-).

NO!

>> Well, I would imagine the Testing.app() thing would have a similar 
>> hook for you to replace the database it uses for testing...
> 
> Would this then make Testing simpler or just different?

For you, different. For everyone else, much simpler.

> In Zope 2.7 the testrunner could learn a new command line switch: -C 
> configfile
> (I have to thank Shane for gently pushing me towards this idea)

That would be cool :-)

> We could then run tests like so:
> 
>   python /Zope/utilities/testrunner.py -qd . -C /home/zope/etc/zope.conf
> 
> This seems pretty neat and dobale with little changes to Testing, 
> App.FindHomes, and Zope.App.startup.

*nods*

> For Zope 2.6 I see two options:
> 
> - Stop Testing from changing INSTANCE_HOME so people can at least run tests
>   after setting the INSTANCE_HOME environment variable. 

I'd go for this.

> Note that you can
>   already do this with ZopeTestCase.

What is ZopeTestCase?

Chris