delete files that are no longer needed

[luerhard]

It would be supernice, if there was a way to automatically remove files (and directories) that are leftover from tests that do not exist anymore. Tests are renamed regularly and after that you (or at least I) have a lot of leftover datafiles that I need to remove manually.

[nicoddemus]

Hi @luerhard,

Thanks for the suggestion!

I've felt this need myself in the past, but there are a few details that complicate things:

1. The data directories might contain files other than the ones handled by pytest-regressions, so it is not really safe for us to remove anything there, I believe.
2. The data directory is managed by pytest-datadir, so my impression is that it would need some sort of similar feature in there, that might overlap here (for example, delete data_ directories which don't have an associated test_ file).

Those are my thoughts, but feel free to suggest solutions if you come up with anything. 👍

[luerhard]

Hi @nicoddemus, thanks for the reply ! A few thoughts on that: I am not really sure why someone would store any files other than pytest-regressions data files in those folders. Is there any good reason for this? If there is, I see two possibilities to handle that:

• either one has to track all created files in a .pytest_reg file or database or something similar
• or we could hide the data_ directories as .data_ directories to point out that nobody should store anything else inside apart from the test-data-files.

[tovrstra]

This would be an interesting feature, but other tests using pytest-datadir use files in the same data_* directory. For example:

def test_read_module(datadir):
    contents = (datadir / 'spam.txt').read_text()
    assert contents == 'eggs\n'

def test_data(data_regression):
    data = {"foo": 1}
    data_regression.check(data)

That makes automatic cleaning potentially dangerous.