45.0 Anthropoid

The Avocado team is proud to present another release: Avocado version 45.0, aka, “Anthropoid”, is now available!

Release documentation: Avocado 45.0

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

Users/Test Writers

  • Tests running with the external runner (--external-runner) feature will now have access to the extended behavior for SIMPLE tests, such as being able to exit a test with the WARNING status.
  • Users will now be able to properly run tests based on any Unicode string (as a test reference). To achieve that, the support for arguments to SIMPLE tests was dropped, as it was impossible to have a consistent way to determine if special characters were word separators, arguments or part of the main test name. To overcome the removal of support for arguments on SIMPLE tests, one can use custom loader configurations and the external runner.
  • Test writers now have access to a test temporary directory that will last not only for the duration of the test, but for the duration of the whole job execution. This is a feature that has been requested by many users and one practical example is a test reusing binaries built on by a previous test on the same job. Please note that Avocado still provides as much test isolation and independence as before, but now allows tests to share this one directory.
  • When running jobs with the TAP plugin enabled (the default), users will now also get a results.tap file created by default in their job results directory. This is similar to how JSON, XUNIT and other supported result formats already operate. To disable the TAP creation, either disable the plugin or use --tap-job-result=off.

Distribution

  • Avocado is now available on Fedora. That’s great news for test writers and test runners, who will now be able to rely on Avocado installed on test systems much more easily. Because of Fedora’s rules that favor the stability of packages during a given release, users will find older Avocado versions (currently 43.0) on already released Fedora versions. For users interested in packages for the latest Avocado releases, we’ll continue to provide updated packages on our own repo.
  • After some interruption, we’ve addressed issues that were preventing the update of Avocado packages on PyPI, and thus, preventing users from getting the latest Avocado versions when running $ pip install avocado-framework.

Internal improvements

  • The HTML report plugin contained a font, included by the default bootstrap framework data files, that was not really used. It has now been removed.
  • The selfcheck will now require commits to have a Signed-off-by line, in order to make sure contributors are aware of the terms of their contributions.

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.