Fix for nosetests' capture plugin to avoid timeouts crashing

pyon/util/capture_plugin.py

@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+#!/usr/bin/env python
+
+"""
+Hotfix for issue with BaseExceptions in nosetests's capture plugin.
+
+Sometimes in our testing, a gevent Timeout will cause nose to come crashing
+down with an error while it's trying to format the stdout/stderr capturing
+which is enabled by default. Subsequent tests in a test run will all fail.
+
+The exact issue is because the gevent Timeout is derived from BaseException,
+not Exception, which the Capture plugin tests for and converts to string. By
+the time it is ready to use the error object, it expects it to be a string.
+
+Nose thankfully will let us derive and override the existing built in Plugin
+by specifying the same string name ('capture') of the plugin.
+
+See: http://nose.readthedocs.org/en/latest/plugins/builtin.html
+"""
+
+__author__ = "Dave Foster <dfoster@asascience.com>"
+__license__ = "Apache 2.0"
+
+from nose.plugins.capture import Capture
+
+class PyccCapture(Capture):
+    name = 'capture'
+
+    def addCaptureToErr(self, ev, output):
+        if isinstance(ev, BaseException) and not isinstance(ev, Exception):
+            # BaseException derived? convert to unicode string so super's method doesn't choke
+            ev = unicode(ev)
+        return super(PyccCapture, self).addCaptureToErr(ev, output)
+

setup.py

@@ -29,6 +29,7 @@
                  'pycc_plugin=pyon.util.pycc_plugin:PYCC',
                  'timer_plugin=pyon.util.timer_plugin:TestTimer',
                  'queueblame=pyon.util.queueblame_plugin:QueueBlame',
+                 'capture=pyon.util.capture_plugin:PyccCapture',
                  'insulate=pyon.util.insulate:Insulate',
                  'insulateslave=pyon.util.insulate:InsulateSlave',
                  'gevent_profiler=pyon.util.nose_gevent_profiler:TestGeventProfiler'