41.0 Outlander

The Avocado team is proud to present another release: Avocado version 41.0, aka, “Outlander”, is now available!

Release documentation: Avocado 41.0

The major changes introduced on this version are listed below, roughly categorized into major topics and intended audience:

Users/Test Writers

  • Multiplex: remove the -s (system-wide) shortcut to avoid confusion with silent from main apps.
  • New avocado.utils.linux_modules.check_kernel_config() method, with which users can check if a kernel configuration is not set, a module or built-in.
  • Show link to file which failed to be processed by sysinfo.
  • New path key type for settings that auto-expand tilde notation, that is, when using avocado.core.settings.Settings.get_value() you can get this special value treatment.
  • The automatic VM IP detection that kicks in when one uses –vm-domain without a matching –vm-hostname, now uses a more reliable method (libvirt/qemu-gust-agent query). On the other hand, the QEMU guest agent is now required if you intend to omit the VM IP/hostname.
  • Warn users when sysinfo configuration files are not present, and consequently no sysinfo is going to be collected.
  • Set LC_ALL=C by default on sysinfo collection to simplify avocado diff comparison between different machines. It can be tweaked in the config file (locale option under sysinfo.collect).
  • Remove deprecated option –multiplex-files.
  • List result plugins (JSON, XUnit, HTML) in avocado plugins command output.

Documentation

  • Mention to the community maintained repositories.
  • Add GIT workflow to the contribution guide.

Developers

  • New make check-long target to run long tests. For example, the new FileLockTest.
  • New make variables target to display Makefile variables.
  • Plugins: add optional plugins directory optional_plugins. This also adds all directories to be found under optional_plugins to the list of candidate plugins when running make clean or make link.

Bugfixes

  • Fix undefined name error avocado.core.remote.runner.
  • Ignore r when checking for avocado in remote executions.
  • Skip file if UnicodeDecodeError is raised when collecting sysinfo.
  • Sysinfo: respect package collection on/off configuration.
  • Use -y in lvcreate to ignore warnings avocado.utils.lv_utils.
  • Fix crash in avocado.core.tree when printing non-string values.
  • setup.py: fix the virtualenv detection so readthedocs.org can properly probe Avocado’s version.

Internal improvements

  • Cleanup runner->multiplexer API
  • Replay re-factoring, renamed avocado.core.replay to avocado.core.jobdata.
  • Partition utility class defaults to ext2. We documented that and reinforced in the accompanying unittests.
  • Unittests for avocado.utils.partition has now more specific checks for the conditions necessary to run the Partition tests (sudo, mkfs.ext2 binary).
  • Several Makefile improvements.

For more information, please check out the complete Avocado changelog.

Release Meeting

The Avocado release meetings are now open to the community via Hangouts on Air. The meetings are recorded and made available on the Avocado Test Framework YouTube channel.

For this release, you can watch the meeting on this link.