Give agents individual names

[CharliePoole]

Working on the GUI implementation of pluggable agents, I realized that users creating agents would probably not use our naming convention and that I would have to allow for it.

That led me to realize that it might be a nice feature for each of our agents to have a different name... like net20-agent, netcore31-agent, etc. That way users could tell immediately which agent had been selected to run their tests when a problem arose.

I'm initially calling this an idea and a breaking change. I think it's at least "a little bit" breaking anyway. Not sure if it's sufficiently breaking to make it wait to 4.0 @nunit/engine-team What do you think?

[ChrisMaddock]

Sure, why not!

Can you clarify why you consider this breaking? Agent behaviour is completely internal to the engine, isn't it?

[CharliePoole]

Well, it's breaking only because some user could say it broke them, if they did something relying on the file name, like launching the agent themselves. Personally, I would prefer to exclude something like this from the definition of "breaking."

[ChrisMaddock]

I agree - I would say that the scenario you describe isn't supported. I've recategorised this as an enhancement accordingly. 🙂

[CharliePoole]

Note... Due to various issues with Visual Studio, using one project to create assemblies with different names turns out to be unworkable. Instead, I'll create a project for each target runtime, sharing the source code. This isn't all bad, since many of these will eventually be removed to become pluggable agent extensions.