[Pyunit-interest] testRunner argument of unittest.main()

[Matthew F. B. <mf...@lo...>]

Here's a question:

I'm trying to use unittest.main in combination with a custom TestRunner
class (which I'll call myTestRunner).  I invoke unittest.main as follows:
if __name__ == '__main__':
   unittest.main(testRunner=myTestRunner())

I would like myTestRunner to be sensitive to command-line arguments such
as --verbosity.  The problem is that I have to pass an *instance* of
myTestRunner to unittest.main, and so it's too early to pass the verbosity
value to myTestRunner's constructor since unittest.main hasn't parsed it
out yet.
Looking through the unittest.py source code that came with Python 2.2.2,
I'm wondering if the following change to the unittest.TestProgram class
would be an improvement:
def __init__(self, module='__main__', defaultTest=None,
             argv=None, testRunner=TextTestRunner,
             testLoader=defaultTestLoader):

    ...

    def runTests(self):
        if type(self.testRunner) is types.ClassType:
            self.testRunner = self.testRunner(verbosity=self.verbosity)
        result = self.testRunner.run(self.test)
        sys.exit(not result.wasSuccessful())

Two changes here:
1) The testRunner argument of __init__ defaults to TextTestRunner instead
of None.2) The runTests method checks if self.testRunner is a class
(TextTestRunner *is* a class), and if so creates an instance of that
class, passing it self.verbosity (the part I'm after).
Apart from modifying unittest.py itself, is there another way that I could
get the behavior I'm after?
Thanks,
Matthew Barnes
ma...@ba...