pytest 3.3: TerminalReporter.writer removed without deprecating it first

[jluebbe]

We have a small plugin, which uses the TerminalReporter.writer attribute to continue printing to the terminal even when normal output is captured and the CaptureFixture is used.

The writer attribute was originally added by 1fc466e back in 2013. It was removed by 05cfdcc (which intended to revert 3b30c93), probably by mistake.

[nicoddemus]

@jluebbe thanks for reporting! Indeed writer was removed by accident while trying to revert 05cfdcc which rendered _tw read-only while preparing for 3.3 in #2945. The reason for that revert is because pytest-instafail plugin attempts to set _tw to something else. 😞

Not sure how to proceed here to be honest. Removing writer was a mistake, but I'm thinking re-adding TerminalReporter.writer only to deprecate it in the next release will only add to the confusion further. Opinions?

@RonnyPfannschmidt @The-Compiler

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

since its a public and used api we have to bring it back and can deprecate it in the next feature release

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

man - for extra fun, practically all new code in that linked commit is broken and the plug-in itself has better methods to handle it already existing back at that time (unlike other methods of the object those in particular dont maintain the state, so in all fairness we should deprecate all of them