38.0 Love, Ken

You guessed it right: this is another Avocado release announcement: release 38.0, aka “Love, Ken”, is now out!

Release documentation: Avocado 38.0

Another development cycle has just finished, and our community will receive this new release containing a nice assortment of bug fixes and new features.

  • The download of assets in tests now allow for an expiration time. This means that tests that need to download any kind of external asset, say a tarball, can now automatically benefit from the download cache, but can also keep receiving new versions automatically.

    Suppose your asset uses an asset named myproject-daily.tar.bz2, and that your test runs 50 times a day. By setting the expire time to 1d (1 day), your test will benefit from cache on most runs, but will still fetch the new version when the 24 hours from the first download have passed.

    For more information, please check out the documentation on the expire parameter to the fetch_asset() method.

  • Environment variables can be propagated into tests running on remote systems. It’s a known fact that one way to influence application behavior, including test, is to set environment variables. A command line such as:

    $ MYAPP_DEBUG=1 avocado run myapp_test.py

    Will work as expected on a local system. But Avocado also allows running tests on remote machines, and up until now, it has been lacking a way to propagate environment variables to the remote system.

    Now, you can use:

    $ MYAPP_DEBUG=1 avocado run --env-keep MYAPP_DEBUG \
  --remote-host test-machine myapp_test.py

  • The plugin interfaces have been moved into the avocado.core.plugin_interfaces module. This means that plugin writers now have to import the interface definitions this namespace, example:

    ...
from avocado.core.plugin_interfaces import CLICmd

class MyCommand(CLICmd):
...

    This is a way to keep ourselves honest, and say that there’s no difference from plugin interfaces to Avocado’s core implementation, that is, they may change at will. For greater stability, one should be tracking the LTS releases.

    Also, it effectively makes all plugins the same, whether they’re implemented and shipped as part of Avocado, or as part of external projects.

  • A contrib script for running kvm-unit-tests. As some people are aware, Avocado has indeed a close relation to virtualization testing. Avocado-VT is one obvious example, but there are other virtualization related test suites can Avocado can run.

    This release adds a contrib script that will fetch, download, compile and run kvm-unit-tests using Avocado’s external runner feature. This gives results in a better granularity than the support that exists in Avocado-VT, which gives only a single PASS/FAIL for the entire test suite execution.

For more information, please check out the Avocado changelog.

Avocado-VT

Also, while we focused on Avocado, let’s also not forget that Avocado-VT maintains it’s own fast pace of incoming niceties.

  • s390 support: Avocado-VT is breaking into new grounds, and now has support for the s390 architecture. Fedora 23 for s390 has been added as a valid guest OS, and s390-virtio has been added as a new machine type.

  • Avocado-VT is now more resilient against failures to persist its environment file, and will only give warnings instead of errors when it fails to save it.

  • An improved implementation of the “job lock” plugin, which prevents multiple Avocado jobs with VT tests to run simultaneously. Since there’s no finer grained resource locking in Avocado-VT, this is a global lock that will prevent issues such as image corruption when two jobs are run at the same time.

    This new implementation will now check if existing lock files are stale, that is, they are leftovers from previous run. If the processes associated with these files are not present, the stale lock files are deleted, removing the need to clean them up manually. It also outputs better debugging information when failures to acquire lock.

The complete list of changes to Avocado-VT are available on Avocado-VT changelog.

Miscellaneous

While not officially part of this release, this development cycle saw the introduction of new tests on our avocado-misc-tests. Go check it out!

Finally, since Avocado and Avocado-VT are not newly born anymore, we decided to update information mentioning KVM-Autotest, virt-test on so on around the web. This will hopefully redirect new users to the Avocado community and avoid confusion.

Happy hacking and testing!

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