Making tests run faster

I'm sorry I'm coming to this conversation rather late in the day, but I wonder whether there has been any thought given to moving fixtures from core Rails into a plugin? I know that a lot of developers (including me) don't use them in their tests any more - preferring instead to use mocking in unit tests that don't touch the database in combination with integration tests that do touch the database and explicitly call ActiveRecord create!, etc, to insert data. I only mention the idea because seems to fit with the philosophy of moving stuff out into plugins. Anyway, just a thought.

As someone who uses fixtures each and every day, I have no interest in seeing this happen :slight_smile:

Having said that, if fixtures are somehow getting in the way for those of you who *don't* use them, we could take patches to clean that up.

> I think we should leave freezing time out as a separate concern and > just focus on the fixture speedups for now. No need to marry the two > issues, imo.

I think you still want to do enough freezing so that it looks like your fixtures were loaded at the same time. Otherwise you end up with weird stuff like blog posts created before the user that created them & other oddities.

I'm with David on this one, for the cases where it matters you can still freeze time yourself. We can address the other oddities if and when a large number of people report them.

Agreed. The patch currently attached to the ticket already reflects this.

Fred