[Twisted-Python] Running twisted.trial unittests using nose

[Andrew Bennetts]

glyph at divmod.com wrote:
[...]
> Twisted application does, and which is not _really_ supported by the 
> framework: re-start the reactor repeatedly.
> 
> Eventually, 'trial' itself will not do this, and will behave as a 
> "normal" Twisted application.  'trial' will, as stated by the ticket I 
> just linked to, still support other test runners by having a 'run' 
> method that starts and shuts down the reactor, but it won't be used 
> internally.  The main reason to do this is that there are various tools 
> which would be nice to use Twisted functionality in-process with the 
> tests for reporting results.  Doing that will probably remain a trial- 
> exclusive feature, because other test runners will necessarily need to 
> completely shut down the reactor at the end of each test.

I've expressed this opinion before, but FWIW:

I don't think this is the right approach.  The right approach is to fix Twisted
to support multiple simultaneous reactors, so that your Twisted test runner that
wants to do stuff with a reactor is isolated from the tests, and vice versa.
The tests should then use a fresh reactor for each test.  It's simple and robust.

The reactor can't be comprehensively unittested until multiple
reactors/restartable reactors are supported anyway, so it should be done.  This
would also make it possible to consider testing multiple different reactor
implementations in a single test run.

I see only a continuation of the problems that have been plaguing Trial for
*years* with your approach.

-Andrew.