[Question]: clarification on autouse fixture invocation

[AlessandroMiola]

Hi Eric :)
first off, congrats for maintaining such an amazing blog on pytest features. I'm gradually going through all of the posts: they're great!

As for the autouse internals, some doubts did arise. I'd like to ask you whether you could shed some light on the following:

• at times (see test/test_number_conversions.py or test/test_combining_autouse_with_normal.py etc.) it seems that specifying autouse=True is irrelevant as you would get the test passed as well by omitting it (as long as you pass the fixture to other fixtures or to test functions); said differently, it is not crystal clear (to me) where's the advantage in specifying autouse=True in situations where not explicitly passing the fixture (to other fixtures or to test functions) would eventually lead to a failure

• if I were to infer the meaning of autouse=True before reading your post, I would have said that it would have helped eliminating the need for manual fixture invocation (which I would have read as the opportunity to avoid manually passing fixtures to test functions or other fixtures) in specific situations; as it doesn't seem to be the case, can you elaborate more on the rationale behind it? Not even the docs do make it clear (to me at least :))

[Cliffart44]

@AlessandroMiola, I agree! For me it would be better something like...

import pytest


class TestAttribute:
    @pytest.fixture(autouse=True)
    def set_attribute(self):
        self.attribute = True

    def test_autouse_fixture(self):
        assert self.attribute

    def test_autouse_fixture_again(self):
        assert self.attribute