[android-devel] Android NUnitLite Runners

[Jonathan Pryor]

In the beginning…we needed “enough things" for internal use and to “bootstrap” the external developer ecosystem. As such, we bundled our own NUnit, our own NUnit test runner, “our own” F#, our own Google Play Services binding, our own Support binding, our own...

As we moved forward, the *Xamarin.Android* team has stopped working on many of these things, as other teams and groups “take over”:

* Google Play Services and the Support binding are no longer handled by the Xamarin.Android team and distributed with Xamarin.Android itself, but instead are handled by the “Components” team and distributed by NuGet packages.

* Xamarin.Android continues to ship F#, but it’s an *ancient* F# (F# 3.1?). F# upstream officially supports Xamarin as a target platform, so the official F# packages can — and should! — be used instead.

Which brings us to Xamarin.Android.NUnitLite.

The Xamarin.Android team isn’t big, so we need to focus on a few things. Xamarin.Android.NUnitLite is *not* one of those things, We’ll continue to maintain it, because we use it for our own unit tests, but we’ll only “maintain” it to *keep it running*. This doesn’t require any effort, practically speaking.

> Is there any plan to combine this effort?

There are no plans to combine the various runners.

> If not, I am considering a PR for the nunit runners to address #29 to bring feature parity closer to what it's in XA.

Please do so.

I would love to have the world “move on” to a place where the upstream NUnit packages can be used directly, and we can eventually remove the Xamarin.Android.NUnitLite assembly.

Alternatively, we should look at xUnit, which offers Xamarin.Android support:

	https://www.nuget.org/packages/xunit.runner.devices/ <https://www.nuget.org/packages/xunit.runner.devices/>
	http://gregshackles.com/testing-xamarin-apps-getting-started-with-xunit/

Either way, Xamarin.Android *itself* should get out of the unit test runner “business.” Unit test runners would be better served by the broader ecosystem.

Thanks,
 - Jon

On Dec 5, 2016, at 11:10 AM, John Miller via android-devel <android-devel at lists.dot.net> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've been investigating an issue for a support case that involves the NUnitLite Android runner that we ship (https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-android/tree/master/src/Xamarin.Android.NUnitLite <https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-android/tree/master/src/Xamarin.Android.NUnitLite>). I believe the issue is similar to this (https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=22606 <https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=22606>), but on Android. I've done some digging on this, and it seems to be an issue in the NUnitLite included in this source. While looking around, I ran across this repo too: https://github.com/nunit/nunit.xamarin <https://github.com/nunit/nunit.xamarin>. 
> 
> I am curious if there are plans to combine efforts for these runners? The version of the runner/nunitlite in XA is old, and has bugs that have not been fixed in a while. The NUnit runners are updated, but are missing some features that the XA runner has (ability to execute specific tests in a suite), see: 
> 
> https://github.com/nunit/nunit.xamarin/issues/29 <https://github.com/nunit/nunit.xamarin/issues/29>
> https://github.com/nunit/nunit.xamarin/issues/14 <https://github.com/nunit/nunit.xamarin/issues/14>
> 
> Also, https://github.com/nunit/nunit.xamarin/issues/29#issuecomment-199826872 <https://github.com/nunit/nunit.xamarin/issues/29#issuecomment-199826872>
> 
> Is there any plan to combine this effort? If not, I am considering a PR for the nunit runners to address #29 to bring feature parity closer to what it's in XA. Fixing the bugs in XA's NUnitLite was non-trivial for me so far, but is also still an option. I'm looking for input on this and any suggestions on which to tackle (PR the Nunit runners or focus on PR for the XA repo).
> 
> Best,
> John
> 
> Sent from Outlook <http://aka.ms/weboutlook>
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