The Next LTS

The Long Term Stability releases of Avocado are the result of the accumulated changes on regular (non-LTS) releases.

This section tracks the changes introduced on each regular (non-LTS) Avocado release, and gives a sneak preview of what will make into the next LTS release.

What’s new?

When compared to the last LTS (52.x), the main changes to be introduced by the next LTS version are:

  • A new loader implementation, that reuses (and resembles) the YAML input used for the varianter yaml_to_mux plugin. It allows the definition of test suite based on a YAML file, including different variants for different tests. For more information refer to YAML Loader (yaml_loader).
  • A better handling of interruption related signals, such as SIGINT and SIGTERM. Avocado will now try harder to not leave test processes that don’t respond to those signals, and will itself behave better when it receives them. For a complete description refer to Signal Handlers.
  • The output generated by tests on stdout and stderr are now properly prefixed with [stdout] and [stderr] in the job.log. The prefix is not applied in the case of $test_result/stdout and $test_result/stderr files, as one would expect.
  • Test writers will get better protection against mistakes when trying to overwrite avocado.core.test.Test “properties”. Some of those were previously implemented using avocado.utils.data_structures.LazyProperty() which did not prevent test writers from overwriting them.
  • Avocado can now run list and run standard Python unittests, that is, tests written in Python that use the unittest library alone.
  • Improvements in the serialization of TestIDs allow test result directories to be properly stored and accessed on Windows based filesystems.
  • The complete output of tests, that is the combination of STDOUT and STDERR is now also recorded in the test result directory as a file named output.
  • Support for listing and running golang tests has been introduced. Avocado can now discover tests written in Go, and if Go is properly installed, Avocado can run them.
  • The support for test data files has been improved to support more specific sources of data. For instance, when a test file used to contain more than one test, all of them shared the same datadir property value, thus the same directory which contained data files. Now, tests should use the newly introduced get_data() API, which will attempt to locate data files specific to the variant (if used), test name, and finally file name. For more information, please refer to the section Accessing test data files.
  • The output check feature will now use the to the most specific data source location available, which is a consequence of the switch to the use of the get_data() API discussed previously. This means that two tests in a single file can generate different output, generate different stdout.expected or stderr.expected.
  • When the output check feature finds a mismatch between expected and actual output, will now produce a unified diff of those, instead of printing out their full content. This makes it a lot easier to read the logs and quickly spot the differences and possibly the failure cause(s).
  • Sysinfo collection can now be enabled on a test level basis.
  • The avocado.core.utils.vmimage library now allows users to expand the builtin list of image providers. If you have a local cache of public images, or your own images, you can quickly and easily register your own providers and thus use your images on your tests.
  • Avocado can record the output generated from a test, which can then be used to determine if the test passed or failed. This feature is commonly known as “output check”. Traditionally, users would choose to record the output from STDOUT and/or STDERR into separate streams, which would be saved into different files. Some tests suites actually put all content of STDOUT and STDERR together, and unless we record them together, it’d be impossible to record them in the right order. This version introduces the combined option to --output-check-record option, which does exactly that: it records both STDOUT and STDERR into a single stream and into a single file (named output in the test results, and output.expected in the test data directory).
  • A new varianter plugin has been introduced, based on PICT. PICT is a “Pair Wise” combinatorial tool, that can generate optimal combination of parameters to tests, so that (by default) at least a unique pair of parameter values will be tested at once.
  • A new (optional) plugin is avaiable, the “result uploader”. It allows job results to be copied over to a centralized results server at the end of job execution. Please refer to Results Upload Plugin for more information.
  • The avocado.Test.default_parameters mechanism for setting default parameters on tests has been removed. This was introduced quite early in the Avocado development, and allowed users to set a dictionary at the class level with keys/values that would serve as default parameter values. The recommended approach now, is to just provide default values when calling the self.params.get within a test method, such as self.params.get("key", default="default_value_for_key").
  • The __getattr__ interface for self.params has been removed. It used to allow users to use a syntax such as self.params.key when attempting to access the value for key key. The supported syntax is self.params.get("key") to achieve the same thing.
  • The avocado.utils.vmimage library now contains support for Avocado’s own JeOS (“Just Enough Operating System”) image. A nice addition given the fact that it’s the default image used in Avocado-VT and the latest version is available in the following architectures: x86_64, aarch64, ppc64, ppc64le and s390x.
  • The installation of Avocado from sources has improved and moved towards a more “Pythonic” approach. Installation of files in “non-Pythonic locations” such as /etc are no longer attempted by the Python setup.py code. Configuration files, for instance, are now considered package data files of the avocado package. The end result is that installation from source works fine outside virtual environments (in addition to installations inside virtual environments). For instance, the locations of /etc (config) and /usr/libexec (libexec) files changed to live within the pkg_data (eg. /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/avocado/etc) by default in order to not to modify files outside the package dir, which allows user installation and also the distribution of wheel packages. GNU/Linux distributions might still modify this to better follow their conventions (eg. for RPM the original locations are used). Please refer to the output of the avocado config command to see the configuration files that are actively being used on your installation.
  • A new plugin enables users to list and execute tests based on the GLib test framework. This plugin allows individual tests inside a single binary to be listed and executed.
  • Users of the YAML test loader have now access to a few special keys that can tweak test attributes, including adding prefixes to test names. This allows users to easily differentiate among execution of the same test, but executed different configurations. For more information, look for “special keys” in the YAML Loader plugin documentation.
  • Users can now dump variants to a (JSON) file, and also reuse a previously created file in their future jobs execution. This allows users to avoid recomputing the variants on every job, which might bring significant speed ups in job execution or simply better control of the variants used during a job. Also notice that even when users do not manually dump a variants file to a specific location, Avocado will automatically save a suitable file at jobdata/variants.json as part of a Job results directory structure.
  • SIMPLE tests were limited to returning PASS, FAIL and WARN statuses. Now SIMPLE tests can now also return SKIP status. At the same time, SIMPLE tests were previously limited in how they would flag a WARN or SKIP from the underlying executable. This is now configurable by means of regular expressions.
  • The avocado.utils.process has seen a number of changes related to how it handles data from the executed processes. In a nutshell, process output (on both stdout and stderr) is now considered binary data. Users that need to deal with text instead, should use the newly added avocado.utils.process.CmdResult.stdout_text and avocado.utils.process.CmdResult.stderr_text, which are convenience properties that will attempt to decode the stdout or stderr data into a string-like type using the encoding set, and if none is set, falling back to the Python default encoding. This change of behavior was needed to accommodate Python’s 2 and Python’s 3 differences in bytes and string-like types and handling.
  • The TAP result format plugin received improvements, including support for reporting Avocado tests with CANCEL status as SKIP (which is the closest status available in the TAP specification), and providing more visible warning information in the form of comments when Avocado tests finish with WARN status (while maintaining the test as a PASS, since TAP doesn’t define a WARN status).
  • Redundant (and deprecated) fields in the test sections of the JSON result output were removed. Now, instead of url, test and id carrying the same information, only id remains.
  • The exception raised by the utility functions in avocado.utils.memory has been renamed from MemoryError and became avocado.utils.memory.MemError. The reason is that MemoryError is a Python standard exception, that is intended to be used on different situations.
  • Added possibility to limit the amount of characters embedded as “system-out” in the xunit output plugin (--xunit-max-test-log-chars XX).
  • The xunit result plugin can now limit the amount of output generated by individual tests that will make into the XML based output file. This is intended for situations where tests can generate prohibitive amounts of output that can render the file too large to be reused elsewhere (such as imported by Jenkins).
  • SIMPLE tests can also finish with SKIP OR WARN status, depending on the output produced, and the Avocado test runner configuration. It now supports patterns that span across multiple lines. For more information, refer to SIMPLE Tests Status.
  • Simple bytes and “unicode strings” utility functions have been added to avocado.utils.astring, and can be used by extension and test writers that need consistent results across Python major versions.
  • The avocado.Test.srcdir attribute has been removed, and with it, the AVOCADO_TEST_SRCDIR environment variable set by Avocado. This was done after a deprecation period, so tests should have been modified by now to make use of the avocado.Test.workdir instead.
  • The avocado.Test.datadir attribute has been removed, and with it, the AVOCADO_TEST_DATADIR environment variable set by Avocado. This was done after a deprecation period, so tests should have been modified by now to make use of the avocado.Test.get_data() instead.
  • The avocado.utils.cpu.set_cpuidle_state() function now takes a boolean value for its disable parameter (while still allowing the previous integer (0/1) values to be used). The goal is to have a more Pythonic interface, and to drop support legacy integer (0/1) use in the upcoming releases.
  • avocado.utils.astring.ENCODING is a new addition, and holds the encoding used on many other Avocado utilities. If your test needs to convert between binary data and text, we recommend you use it as the default encoding (unless your test knows better).
  • avocado.utils.astring.to_text() now supports setting the error handler. This means that when a perfect decoding is not possible, users can choose how to handle it, like, for example, ignoring the offending characters.
  • When running a process by means of the avocado.utils.process module utilities, the output of such a process is captured and can be logged in a stdout/stderr (or combined output) file. The logging is now more resilient to decode errors, and will use the replace error handler by default. Please note that the downside is that this may produce different content in those files, from what was actually output by the processes if decoding error conditions happen.
  • The avocado.utils.astring.tabular_output() will now properly strip trailing whitespace from lines that don’t contain data for all “columns”. This is also reflected in the (tabular) output of commands such as avocado list -v.
  • Including test logs in TAP plugin is disabled by default and can be enabled using --tap-include-logs.

Complete list of changes

For a complete list of changes between the last LTS release (52.0) and this release, please check out the Avocado commit changelog.