[cross_platform_cmd] Albacore 2.0 doesn't support colored console

[rprouse]

I was evaluating both 1.0 and 2.0 to wrap msbuild and nunit tests. Colored output from msbuild worked fine in 1.0, but in 2.0 it was just the default console color. It isn't a major problem, but it does make it difficult to pick out errors or warnings. Am I doing something wrong, or is that expected?

[haf]

It's not expected; it has to do with how we wrap the operating system invocation. I haven't been able to find a good resource on why or how the colouring is decided. I'd very much welcome help.

[rprouse]

If I get a chance, I will take a look, although my Ruby skills are very rusty. I recently added colorization to the nunit-console and was disappointed when it disappeared again :) We are considering using albacore to build NUnit v3. If we do, it will give me more excuses to dive into this code.

[haf]

Here is the line of code. I'm interleaving output from the error stream and the output stream, while saving it in memory so I can print it later. Perhaps the colourization is an option on a stream?

[haf]

You might also be interested in using my ultimate process management branch, which uses #select. It's taken from the foreman gem and my aim is to allow background tasks to spawn while doing tests, e.g. to spawn a web server while running integration nunit tests.

[tgeens]

I think it's related to tty-detection by the child process ?

Using IO.pipe as stdout will disable colored ansi output:

>> read,write = IO.pipe
=> [#<IO:fd 11>, #<IO:fd 12>]
>> write.isatty
=> false

Using Albacore.application.output however, seems suitable:

>> require('albacore')
=> false
>> Albacore.application.output.isatty
=> true

If I replace :out => write by :out => Albacore.application.output I do get colored output ... but I'm most probably breaking other stuff ...

[haf]

Do the tests pass? You might be breaking output capture and therefore pattern matching.

[vicp-iq]

Seems like this is still active. Is the V2.2 milestone still a work in progress?

[haf]

@vicp-iq Yes, but there's no funding currently, so it's PR based.