CLI options for IDE integrations.

[0xorial]

I was looking at a way to integrate tape in an IDE (vscode in particular) and it seems that it is missing 3 features:

• CLI option to run only one test
• CLI option to exclude a certain test
• CLI option to dry-run, the tests - enumerate them to IDE without running.

Do you think it is feasible, would you be open to a PR for that and in that case do you think it is difficult to add?

[ljharb]

I don't think these are really possible.

For the third, the tests aren't static - they have to actually run to notify tape what the tests even are. It only makes sense in mocha's BDD style because you can't nest its, but in tap/tape's style, you can nest tests as much as you want.

For the first or second, how would you identify a given test? Test descriptions aren't guaranteed to be unique, and using the number isn't deterministic (see #301).

[0xorial]

Pity, but thanks for the feedback!

[ljharb]

There might be some usefulness in a pattern-based approach to match on test descriptions - which would be also available as a CLI flag. Are you interested in sketching out how something like that might work?

[0xorial]

Is anyone working on this in Windows? I spent ~1h trying to get the tests to succeed, wondering if I am missing something obvious... :/

[ljharb]

@0xorial afaik it works fine in windows, but certainly i don’t develop in it. If you’re having trouble, please file a separate issue.