Providing a way to specify how to run tests (and docs?)

[ofek (Ofek Lev)]

@bernatgabor

@CAM-Gerlach

However, it runs into the issue discussed above—there’s conflation between two levels of the stack, where either a testing tool or a task runner may be invoked here.

Hence why I don’t like it that much. If the user sets up a testing (or documentation) tool here it easily can fail downstream or on another machine because you never addressed all the other factors at play

@bernatgabor

I think it’s similarly important that whatever we come up can live together with task runners and not cannibalize it. It would be a bad place where some of your test setup/teardown logic is in the tasks section and the rest in nox/tox configuration files (ini, toml or python file).

I completely agree with Bernát, perhaps in part due to both of us maintaining such a tool.

I think what most posters in this conversation are missing is that tox, hatch, nox, etc. should not be thought of as task runners but rather as environment managers, which is totally different and far more complex.

Through that lens, what seems to be happening here is distributions like Fedora & Conda want a universal way to map the config of such managers (since most projects use one) to their own build system’s format.

As such, I’m quite against standardization on this one. Perhaps tox and the like could offer a command that outputs the JSON config of the default or base environment that distributions could consume and translate to their liking.