configurable verbosity during test runs

[Paul Winkler <pw@…>]

When running django-admin.py test, with SOUTH_TESTS_MIGRATE=True, South spews a ton of DEBUG information to the console. It dwarfs the actual test output and makes it hard to read.

I would really like a way to turn that off.
It doesn't seem to respect django-admin.py test -v 0

Perhaps a setting like SOUTH_TESTS_VERBOSITY?

[Paul Winkler <pw@…>]

Two things I've discovered:

1) The problem only happens if I've got a handler set up on the root logger.
For example, this triggers the problem (even though the level is set to INFO):

import logging
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO,
                    format="%(asctime)-15s %(levelname)-8s %(message)s")

2) I don't quite understand why, but copying this method from python 2.7's NullHandler? into South's NullHandler? fixes the problem:

def handle(self, record):
    pass

[andrew]

Well, South uses its own logger, called "south" - have you tried setting the output level on that to INFO?

Additionally, -v 0 will be quiet only if you've not configured logging output yourself, otherwise it's up to you to get the config right :)

[Paul Winkler <pw@…>]

I've traced this down to a surprising (to me) behavior of logging.basicConfig(level=...).
It sets the root logger's level, creates a default handler, and does not set that handler's level.

When a child logger logs a message, it checks the child logger's effective level (in this case DEBUG, because south sets its own logger's level to DEBUG); then when handlers are inherited from parent loggers, it is the handlers' level that matters, not the parent logger's level. So basicConfig(level=INFO) will allow all loggers other than the root logger to log at any level. I never realized that before. :-(

Given that, I do think it's a bit unusual that south sets its own logger's level to DEBUG at import time. Wny do you want DEBUG on by default? It's also surprising because if I call logging.getLogger('south').setLevel(n), it has no effect unless I import south first.

(I still don't understand why replacing south's NullHandler? implementation with the one from python 2.7 has the effect it does; AFAICT it shouldn't make any difference.)

[Paul Winkler <pw@…>]

... And apparently that behavior of logging.basicConfig() has been fixed in Python 2.7.
So this entire bug report can probably be ignored :-\

I'm really sorry about the noise.

[andrew]

No problem - logging has always been a, uh, interesting Python module.