spawn() fails to properly exercise terminal applications

[bcoe]

I noticed while attempting to recreate a failing test case related to yargs #497 that I could not get citgm to fail (as expected) on a test outputting a large chunk of text to the terminal:

info:    module name:        | yargs               
info:    version:            | 4.7.0               
info:    done                | The smoke test has passed.

After digging further, I realized that it is related to spawn() being run with the default pipe behavior. If I switch to stdio: "inherit", tests start failing:

Unfortunately, using inherit results in very noisy output.

I'm not sure what the best fix is here, but I think we'd be smart to eliminate the discrepancy between a user interacting with the terminal, and citgm consuming a spawned terminal output.

[bcoe]

@jasnell @thealphanerd silly question, could we live with the noisy output? the value is that we exercise libraries that interact with stdout/stderr in a more realistic way ... we'd now be in a position to catch nodejs/node#6456 in the future.

[MylesBorins]

if the test suite still passes and it doesn't cause CI to run super slow I'm all for it

[jasnell]

I'm ok with it also as long as it makes the tests more reliable and we still get the output we need.

[bcoe]

@jasnell @thealphanerd I'll submit a working branch that has the noisy output, and a failing run of yargs related to 6456.

[MylesBorins]

Would landing nodejs/node#4598 on v4.x help?

We are no longer support 0.10 / 0.12

[targos]

Is there still something to do here?

[bcoe]

@targos I think you could probably close this, it's pretty stale.