46.0 Burning Bush

The Avocado team is proud to present another release: Avocado version 46.0, aka, “Burning Bush” now available!

Release documentation: Avocado 46.0

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

Users/Test Writers

  • Avocado test writers can now use a family of decorators, namely avocado.skip(), avocado.skipIf() and avocado.skipUnless() to skip the execution of tests. These are similar to the well known unittest decorators.

  • Sysinfo collection based on command execution now allows a timeout to be set. This makes test job executions with sysinfo enabled more reliable, because the job won’t hang until it reaches the job timeout.

  • Users will receive better error messages from the multiplexer (variant subsystem) when the given YAML files do not exist.

  • Users of the avocado.utils.process.system_output() will now get the command output with the trailing newline stripped by default. If needed, a parameter can be used to preserve the newline. This is now consistent with most Python process execution utility APIs.

Distribution

  • The non-local runner plugins are now distributed in separate RPM packages. Users installing from RPM packages should also install packages such as avocado-plugins-runner-remote, avocado-plugins-runner-vm and avocado-plugins-runner-docker. Users upgrading from previous Avocado versions should also install these packages manually or they will lose the corresponding functionality.

Internal improvements

  • Python 2.6 support has been dropped. This now paves the way for our energy to be better spent on developing new features and also bring proper support for Python 3.x.

Bug fixes

  • The TAP result plugin was printing an incorrect test plan when using the multiplexer (variants) mechanism. The total number of tests to be executed (the first line in TAP output) did not account for the number of variants.

  • The remote, vm and docker runners would print some UI related messages even when other types of result (such as TAP, json, etc) would be set to output to STDOUT.

  • Under some scenarios, an Avocado test would create an undesirable and incomplete job result directory on demand.

Documentation / Contrib

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.

Sprint theme: https://trello.com/c/I6KG9bpq/893-sprint-theme-burning-bush