It's quite hard to get python2 to exit gracefully when the code was
intended for python3, because the interpreter will SyntaxError before
running a single line of code. Thankfully, the pytest developers put a
version check in their .ini config, so that should gracefully handle
both wrong-pytest-version and wrong-python-version.
Also document the woes of trying to run the pytest version shipped by
e.g. Debian or Ubuntu.
Use pytest to manage background services, paths, and environment
variables.
Benefits:
- Tests are a little easier to write.
- Cleanup is more reliable. You can CTRL-C a test and it will still shut
down gracefully. If you manually start a conflicting process, the test
fixtures will detect this and abort at startup.
- Don't need to worry about remembering '--test-threads=1'
- Output of sub-processes can be captured to files.
- Test fixtures configure everything to operate under a single test
output directory, making it easier to capture logs in CI.
- Detects all the necessary paths if run from the git root, but can also
run from arbitrary paths by setting environment variables.
There is also a deliberately broken test (test_broken.py) that can be
used to test whether the test fixtures properly clean up after
themselves. It won't run by default; the comment at the top explains how
to enable it.
