Feature request: copy-pasteable test filters

[gibfahn]

Motivation

Today I have to remember how to pass three different kinds of filters to cargo test or cargo nextest run. I end up having to look these up every time.

Nextest has made a lot of things easier, one of which being that it's really easy to see what each test is called, and where it is in the hierarchy, as they all get listed out as they run.

A common debugging flow for me is:

• cargo nextest run --run-ignored=all
• A test fails
• I want to just run that test
• I copy the failing test line and try to paste it into nexttest's filter
• It doesn't work, so I go look at the help to work out what to do

Proposal

If I have a line in cargo nextest run like:

FAIL [   0.009s] clap_config::clap_skipped main

I want to be able to do something like:

cargo nextest run clap_config::clap_skipped main

to run that test. Instead today I have to do (I think this is right):

cargo nextest run -p clap_config --test clap_skipped -- main

Alternatives

I don't understand enough about how things work today and what would be a breaking change to know the best way to do this. Maybe the easiest way would be to change the format that the tests are printed in today? e.g. maybe something like:

-PASS [   0.022s] mycrate utils::version_sort::tests::test_nonlexical_float
+PASS [   0.022s] ::mycrate::utils::version_sort::tests::test_nonlexical_float

and then cargo nextest run understands that a leading :: means to use this filtering method or something.

Additional context

No response

[sunshowers]

Thanks for the feature request! This is intruiging—what do you think of nextest accepting cargo nextest run "clap_config::clap_skipped main" over the command line? Basically accept an exact "<binary_id> <test_name>" match in addition to test filter matches.

[gibfahn]

Yeah I think that would be great. Remembering to double quote the arg is fairly easy, and this gives you that copy-paste ability.

Would this work for all the test types nextest runs? I think it's just unit and integration tests (with cargo workspaces as a complicating factor).

So in my second example you could do cargo nextest run "mycrate utils::version_sort::tests::test_nonlexical_float" for a unit test.

[sunshowers]

Yeah, the binary ID format is well-defined, and in fact we could just split on the first space.