Philosophical Reporter Questions

[plroebuck]

Full Disclosure: Yes, I know the terminal codes will interfere with certain file formats.

• An upcoming change to the xunit reporter intentionally turns use of color off. If a user issues the command below, were his expections met?

$ FORCE_COLOR=1 mocha --reporter xunit

• Should a reporter be able to completely disregard a user setting? If so, should it warn?

If the command line had been that below, I could see not bothering since file output was specified.

$ FORCE_COLOR=1 mocha --reporter xunit --reporter-options output=xunit.xml

While not currently implemented, I could also see reporter that outputs to both file and console.
For instance, the above could also echo any failed tests to console (via reporter option, of course)

[mlucool]

I agree this should either warn or throw.

I could also see reporter that outputs to both file and console.

I have implemented something similar in my code, but the reporter for console is spec and the output for file is xunit because spec is great for people and xunit is great for machines.

[plroebuck]

Ramon has some interesting additions in his xunit reporter, specifically his properties and console output. I think almost everyone would agree that xunit is not the format format for humans. But when you're saving the output to file, it still might be nice to know (on console) whether errors have occurred.

[boneskull]

• We can safely output warnings to STDERR while the test output stays in STDOUT.
• If there's a valid use case for machine-readable reporters to output in color, then we can support such a thing if someone wants it, but I don't believe there is.
• I'm 👎 on a warning if FORCE_COLOR or --color is used with a machine-readable output format. I can see a situation in which it'd create extra work for developers to avoid/suppress the warning--like if it's conflicting with other defaults (e.g., mocha.opts).