48.0 Lost Boundaries

The Avocado team is proud to present another release: Avocado version 48.0, aka, “Lost Boundaries” now available!

Release documentation: Avocado 48.0

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

Users/Test Writers

  • Users of avocado.utils.linux_modules functions will find that a richer set of information is provided in their return values. It now includes module name, size, submodules if present, filename, version, number of modules using it, list of modules it is dependent on and finally a list of params.
  • avocado.TestFail, avocado.TestError and avocado.TestCancel are now public Avocado Test APIs, available from the main avocado namespace. The reason is that test suites may want to define their own exceptions that, while have some custom meaning, also act as a way to fail (or error or cancel) a test.
  • Support for new type of test status, CANCEL, and of course the mechanisms to set a test with this status. CANCEL is a lot like what many people think of SKIP, but, to keep solid definitions and predictable behavior, a SKIP(ped) test is one that was never executed, and a CANCEL(ed) test is one that was partially executed, and then canceled. Calling self.skip() from within a test is now deprecated to adhere even closer to these definitions. Using the skip* decorators (which are outside of the test execution) is still permitted and won’t be deprecated.
  • Introduction of the robot plugin, which allows Robot Framework tests to be listed and executed natively within Avocado. Just think of a super complete Avocado job that runs build tests, unit tests, functional and integration tests… and, on top of it, interactive UI tests for your application!
  • Adjustments to the use of AVOCADO_JOB_FAIL and AVOCADO_FAIL exit status code by Avocado. This matters if you’re checking the exact exit status code that Avocado may return on error condtitions.

Documentation / Contrib

  • Updates to the README and Getting Started documentation section, which now mention the updated package names and are pretty much aligned with each other.

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.