Report file is too complicated -- reporter being too helpful

[stevebroshar]

The reporting configuration of karma has become more complicated over time. But, the changes have not helped me at all. Actually, the changes have only caused me headaches. The junit reporter used to write to a file named 'test-results.xml'. That's pretty arbitrary, but at least my test runner could find it. Now the default name is based on the OS name and version and browser name and version -- most of which is hard to code into my test runner. Now it's possible to specify parameters to a reporter, but even though I set outputDir and outputFile, I don't get what I ask for. The file is still in a folder with a complicated directory name. Karma is trying to be too helpful. It should do what I ask and no more. Extra functionality to support this or that system, make it hard to use outside of those systems. The naming today seems about as arbitrary as it did when the name was test-results.xml. Maybe some people find it useful that the name includes browser and os info, but some don't (like me) and maybe some want other info in there. I should be able to select the output file name ... exactly ... without further modification. And, if you really want to make the file name flexible, then implement a tag system that allows the user to put name parts together as they want. For example: [browser-name]_[browser-version] [os-name][os-version]. Various other tags could be supported too.

Also, separating the reports by browser is the opposite of helpful to me. It's easier for me to deal with the combined results.

[jpaulin]

One possible solution often to seeming over-configurability (being overwhelming) is to either (both can be applied as well):

• have default simple configuration; ok, of course to be discussed: what is considered "default" ?
• have overrides that make it possible to enforce the software back to legacy behavior. Ie. in this case you mentioned the fixed test result file, this could be a configuration directive.