Thanks! High time we add pytest-time, I guess :)

Thanks! High time we add pytest-time, I guess :)

If it's okay with you and Georg, I'll work on a patch to add pytest-timeout (which will attempt to hard-stop tests that run too long) and to update existing backtrack-checking tests to use the timeout.

Let me know if that's something you'd like me to tackle. =)

I have no objection, and given Georg didn't red flag it, I'd say please go ahead. It's fairly obvious to me by now that backtracking needs robust testing, and I don't see how we can do it without timeouts.

Sure, I'd just like a graceful behavior if the timeout plugin isn't installed.

By the way, I just tested the pytest timeout plugin. It supports a thread-based and a signal-based method.

On Windows, which only supports thread-based timeouts, the plugin is unable to interrupt catastrophic backtracking like this:

import re

def test_catastrophic_backtracking():
    re.search(r'\d+\d+a', '0' * 10_000)

The thread-based timeouts can successfully interrupt operations like time.sleep(60) but cannot successfully interrupt catastrophic backtracking. For this reason I'm not pursuing using the pytest-timeout plugin.