0.34.0 The Hour of the Star

Hello to all test enthusiasts out there, specially to those that cherish, care or are just keeping an eye on the greenest test framework there is: Avocado release 0.34.0, aka The Hour of the Star, is now out!

The main changes in Avocado for this release are:

  • A complete overhaul of the logging and output implementation. This means that all Avocado output uses the standard Python logging library making it very consistent and easy to understand [1].
  • Based on the logging and output overhaul, the command line test runner is now very flexible with its output. A user can choose exactly what should be output. Examples include application output only, test output only, both application and test output or any other combination of the builtin streams. The user visible command line option that controls this behavior is –show, which is an application level option, that is, it’s available to all avocado commands. [2]
  • Besides the builtin streams, test writers can use the standard Python logging API to create new streams. These streams can be shown on the command line as mentioned before, or persisted automatically in the job results by means of the –store-logging-stream command line option. [3][4]
  • The new avocado.core.safeloader module, intends to make it easier to to write new test loaders for various types of Python code. [5][6]
  • Based on the new avocado.core.safeloader module, a contrib script called avocado-find-unittests, returns the name of unittest.TestCase based tests found on a given number of Python source code files. [7]
  • Avocado is now able to run its own selftest suite. By leveraging the avocado-find-unittests contrib script and the External Runner [8] feature. A Makefile target is available, allowing developers to run make selfcheck to have the selftest suite run by Avocado. [9]
  • Partial Python 3 support. A number of changes were introduced that allow concurrent Python 2 and 3 support on the same code base. Even though the support for Python 3 is still incomplete, the avocado command line application can already run some limited commands at this point.
  • Asset fetcher utility library. This new utility library, and INSTRUMENTED test feature, allows users to transparently request external assets to be used in tests, having them cached for later use. [10]
  • Further cleanups in the public namespace of the avocado Test class.
  • [BUG FIX] Input from the local system was being passed to remote systems when running tests with either in remote systems or VMs.
  • [BUG FIX] HTML report stability improvements, including better Unicode handling and support for other versions of the Pystache library.
  • [BUG FIX] Atomic updates of the “latest” job symlink, allows for more reliable user experiences when running multiple parallel jobs.
  • [BUG FIX] The avocado.core.data_dir module now dynamically checks the configuration system when deciding where the data directory should be located. This allows for later updates, such as when giving one extra –config parameter in the command line, to be applied consistently throughout the framework and test code.
  • [MAINTENANCE] The CI jobs now run full checks on each commit on any proposed PR, not only on its topmost commit. This gives higher confidence that a commit in a series is not causing breakage that a later commit then inadvertently fixes.

For a complete list of changes please check the Avocado changelog[11].

For Avocado-VT, please check the full Avocado-VT changelog[12].

Avocado Videos

As yet another way to let users know about what’s available in Avocado, we’re introducing short videos with very targeted content on our very own YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP4xob52XwRad0bU_8V28rQ

The first video available demonstrates a couple of new features related to the advanced logging mechanisms, introduced on this release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ur_p5p6YiQ

Install avocado

Instructions are available in our documentation on how to install either with packages or from source[13].

Updated RPM packages are be available in the project repos for Fedora 22, Fedora 23, EPEL 6 and EPEL 7.

Happy hacking and testing!