56.0 The Second Mother
The Avocado team is proud to present another release: Avocado version 56.0, AKA “The Second Mother”, is now available!
Release documentation: Avocado 56.0
The major changes introduced on this version are listed below, roughly categorized into major topics and intended audience:
Users/Test Writers
The
avocado.core.utils.vmimagelibrary 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.A documentation on how to create your own base classes for your tests, kind of like you own Avocado-based test framework, was introduced. This should help users put common tasks into base classes and get even more productive test development.
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
STDOUTand/orSTDERRinto separate streams, which would be saved into different files. Some tests suites actually put all content ofSTDOUTandSTDERRtogether, and unless we record them together, it’d be impossible to record them in the right order. This version introduces thecombinedoption to--output-check-recordoption, which does exactly that: it records bothSTDOUTandSTDERRinto a single stream and into a single file (namedoutputin the test results, andoutput.expectedin 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.
Further progress towards Python 3 support. While this version does not yet advertise full Python 3 support, the next development cycle will tackle any Python 3 issue as a critical bug. On this release, some optional plugins, including the remote and docker runner plugins, received attention and now execute correctly on a Python 3 stack.
Bug Fixes
The remote plugin had a broken check for the timeout when executing commands remotely. It meant that the out-most timeout loop would never reach a second iteration.
The remote and docker plugins had issues on how they were checking the installed Avocado versions.
Internal Changes
The CI checks on Travis received a lot of attention, and a new script that and should be used by maintainers was introduced.
contrib/scripts/avocado-check-pr.shruns tests on all commits in a PR, and sends the result over to GitHub, showing other developers that no regression was introduced within the series.
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.